What's rising?
The online news show Rising is a new favorite source for left news/analysis. I listen to it almost every day. One of the strangest and most interesting things about Rising is the dialogue between left and right populism. The show articulates a new populist position, with left and right uniting. It’s worth watching.
Last week they had a Republican congressman Josh Gallagher on talking about whether we should “rely on the largesse of the Chinese Communist Party” for our supply chains. He says no and has legislation with Sen. Tom Cotton to ‘protect’ US medical supply chains from the Chinese economy. (See the fourth video segment.)
I think one medium-term result of the pandemic crisis will be consolidation of large corporations through bankruptcy of small and medium firms, and then protectionism in global supply chains.
As that happens, nationalist-populist politicians might make reasonable-sounding calls to justify the consolidation and protectionism in the name of the working class. The articulation between conservative and anti-corporate populism after crises is a potent combination we’ve seen before.
In the early 1900s, a similar set of forces convergence in Italy. After crises in international finance in the 1890s, a constellation of ambitions and frustrations emerged between big capitalist firms, right-populists, disgruntled socialists, and the broad working class. Those frustrations turned into alliances that then coalesced into a new political position centered on protection of the nation. It’s the early history of what we call ‘fascism‘ now.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Rising is fascist. I don’t even think the term ‘fascism’ is altogether appropriate for our moment, precisely speaking. Plus, after 40 years of globalization it’s not clear how you could just become protectionist. (Although, something like a pandemic could accelerate that process.)
But I do see these resonances and I think it’s important to point them out, particularly in a world-historical moment of crisis.
For an example of how this could be happening, take a look at masks. Everyone needs masks, right? Karen Ubelhart, Senior Industrials Analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, talks about the business of mask-making in the pandemic, particularly the companies 3M and Honeywell.
It turns out that these company’s supply chains are mostly international. They’re not in the US. Honeywell’s are entirely outside the US and 3M does a third of its manufacturing here.
Trump is pressuring these companies to keep their masks in the US and not to ‘price gouge’, invoking the Defense Production Act. It could be that this contentious relationship between Trump (somehow both ultra-capitalist and champion of the downtrodden American) and corporations develops further as the mode of production founders.
That particularly conversation could continue into other commodities, other corporations, until the ruling class sees that it’s in their interest to move supply chains stateside, forming an alliance between right-populists, a conservative bloc of the working class, professional-managerial class, and ruling class.