I recently read Donald Trump’s 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal. As one would expect, the book flatters its subject’s business acumen. “The building we’re redoing will be a great success”, he enthuses about the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel on Central Park South. Five years later, a headline read: “Plaza Hotel files for bankruptcy protection”. This followed three other Trump bankruptcies in Atlantic City the previous year.
There is, nevertheless, much to glean from his account of building the foundations of the Trump business empire. I’m sceptical of “child is pregnant with adult” analyses in which a person’s behaviour in adolescence, or even earlier, is said to prefigure or even define their later character. After all, people grow, learn, reflect and become more cognisant of the world around them. But a few of Trump’s early reminiscences seem to capture the elderly president so well that it leaves you wondering if he might not have developed in the slightest since his school days:
In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music ... As an adolescent I was mostly interested in creating mischief, because for some reason I liked to stir things up, and I liked to test people. I’d throw water balloons, shoot spitballs, and make a ruckus in the schoolyard and at birthday parties ...
My brother Robert likes to tell the story of the time when it became clear to him where I was headed ... One day we were in the playroom of our house, building with blocks. I wanted to build a very tall building, but it turned out that I didn’t have enough blocks. I asked Robert if I could borrow some of his, and he said, “Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done”. I ended up using all of my blocks, and then all of his, and when I was done, I’d created a beautiful building. I liked it so much that I glued the whole thing together. And that was the end of Robert’s blocks.
The adult Trump’s vulgarity could be thought to originate in flaws developed, perhaps encouraged, during diaper Trump’s formative years. Something peculiar, individual—something very Trumpy. That’s the way many would see it, and undoubtedly it contains a kernel of truth. Yet “character” is fundamentally a social attribute. Reading Trump’s memoir reminded me, again, of Karl Marx’s explanatory note in the first preface to Capital Vol. 1, that, in his outline of how the economy works, individuals are depicted “only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular ... interests”. Later, in chapter ten, one of the book’s most quoted passages reads:
As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
The Art of the Deal, a how-to guide for capitalist success, is a compendium of lessons about ruthlessness, about trust and honesty being scarce commodities, and about the business world being a terrible place that destroys good people; a place in which the things that make us human—cooperation, love, kindness—are attributes of those who don’t make for successful capitalists.
Marx comes to a similar conclusion, although the sense of causation is reversed: capitalists are vampires because of their social role as exploiters and oppressors. They destroy part of their humanity so that they can be reborn as inhuman, unhuman, subhuman. They do so not because of their individuality, but because their class position demands that they replace individuality with cold, calculating economic rationality—at least while on the job. Like snipers, they dissociate themselves personally from the professional killers they must be. They constantly retreat from civil society’s war of all against all, to the family, where they can return to intimacy.
This is hardly breaking news, of course. Anyone familiar with Marx knows the method of analysis. And for years at Red Flag, we’ve written variants of the line that Trump is “a symptom of a sick system”—not simply a bellicose bomb thrower, but the personification of US capital: arrogant and hardened from a life walking over others, conditioned by the cut-throat, often zero-sum, rivalry of the business world, and now slightly unmoored by a sense of imperial decay.
The wealthiest group of people ever to walk the Earth is confronting an industrial rival, China, which has used the US-designed architecture of the global economy to its advantage. So much so that, in some industries, the “advanced” US increasingly resembles the old Soviet Union: incapable of competing, scrambling to erect an iron curtain of tariffs and throwing buckets of taxpayer incentives at itself.
In Trump, perhaps US imperialism has found a modern Dracula for a decaying castle. Less a republican, more a Noble. At any rate, ready to get out and drink blood. His child-like qualities—the petulance and almost solipsistic self-absorption—are probably advantageous to this end. Moreover, they also got me musing, not for the first time, about whether the class of which he is chief representative is just as juvenile—like a tantrum-prone pre-adolescent handed an empire that it quietly fritted away in its chase for ever more toys. A class focused on mansions, yachts and other shiny objects, but devoid of greater vision.
It’s probably a stretch to lump all the capitalists together like this. There are, after all, many fractions within US capitalism, and many agendas. It might even be questionable to suggest there is a singular interest beyond a few basic economic precepts. At any rate, US capitalists are, for now, going along with the programme, which still promises something for all: deregulation, tax cuts and a full-throttle attack on the idea that the working class and the oppressed should have basic social and economic rights.
“My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward”, Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
Are the administration’s foundations so secure, though? Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal this week, exuded confidence that the unitary executive theory, which underpins the new president’s shock and awe campaign, provides firm ground for Trump to totally reshape the federal government and US society.
By contrast, left-wing political theorist Corey Robin—who argued consistently (and convincingly) during Trump’s first term that the administration was characterised by weakness—maintains that the president remains on shaky ground. For Robin, the fractured and unstable Republican coalition (and party) is the defining feature of the time; Trump relies on executive power not because he is powerful but because he is incapable of ushering his agenda through Congress. That is, the man who wrote The Art of the Deal has proven to be an amateur dealmaker and will continue to flounder.
Conservative columnist Janan Ganesh called the president “an aggressive soft touch” this week in the Financial Times. “Because Trump is so quick to quarrel, people tend to miss that he is also quick to settle”, he wrote. “He almost never drives as hard a bargain as his belligerent manner seems to promise.”
Such perspectives seem to be gaining ground. Time will tell how accurate they prove to be. But missing in many accounts is the question of how political consciousness and working-class expectations (economic, social and political) have shifted, if at all, with the advent of Trump 2.0. I can’t pretend to have divined much about US attitudes to a range of programs now potentially on the chopping block. But popular consciousness will undoubtedly be more important in the coming months and years than the simple calculus of adding up the number of signed orders and legislated policies.
Bannon, in the WSJ interview, hinted that he thinks the government will have to deal with major blowback, including from many of the working-class people that voted for Trump. Noting that the administration will “dial back” a range of social programs (“it’s gonna be pain”) and should then move to cut “entitlements”, he predicted: “The economic situation and the financial situation [that is, federal government debt] has to be addressed. And in the addressing of that, you’re gonna have a firestorm in this country”.
No-one likes having their blood sucked. The question is how many will be prepared to get out the stakes when the US government comes for them.
Rents in Australia
There’s a lot of talk about Australia’s cost-of-living crisis abating. But rents—the biggest single expense for those who don’t own their own homes—continue to rise at more than 6 percent annually, according to the latest figures, which were released at the end of January.
Looking at the latest data, I was surprised to see that rents actually increased faster, and by more, in 2007-09. I don’t remember there being a fuss about it, but it isn’t hard to find pieces talking about a housing crisis at that time. One thing to note is that wages were rising faster, and overall inflation was much lower, in 2007-09 than in recent times (see below). People weren’t being hit left, right and centre, as we have been more recently, and the rent increases perhaps were more easily absorbed in household budgets. The Rudd government’s stimulus in early 2009 might have also cushioned the blow. Labor sent $950 cheques to every adult earning less than $80,000 a year and additional cheques to single-income families, and low- and middle-income households with children. (None of that is captured in the following chart, however, as it would count as increased household income while not altering wage costs.)
The A-Z of Marxism
Have you ever listened to a lawyer, a politician or an academic and thought, “Why don’t they just speak in plain English?” Left-wing activists also occasionally use terms that aren’t much understood outside of our own circles. That’s partly because the socialist movement throughout its history has created a vernacular of working-class struggle, which we want to preserve and promote, even if it’s not widely used at the moment. So we’re creating an activist dictionary, “The A-Z of Marxism”, to help readers understand the language of socialism and trade unionism (including words in this very paragraph, such as “left wing”, “struggle”, “working class”, “activist”, “socialist” and “movement”).
Today’s entry is…
Capitalist
A business owner. Most capitalists own small- or medium-sized companies (and technically are part of the middle class). When socialists talk about “the capitalists”, we usually mean members of the ruling class who own or control big businesses. They are a tiny fraction of a country’s population—less than 1 percent—and run the major sections of the economy. Capitalists include the directors, CEOs and top managers of the biggest companies. (For more, see the Red Flag article “The ruling class in Australia”.)
