Workers World Vol. 18, No. 43
November 3 – Now that the election is over, a period of watchful waiting will begin.
It will be accompanied by rising expectations on the part of millions of workers, especially the Black and Latin people and the poor generally. It is they who made the Carter victory possible.
Even the large mass of people who didn’t vote or participate in the electoral campaign in any way are sure to look with some hope to the new face in the White House for a change to the better in their economic situation.
It is all too true that Carter really hadn’t promised very much to begin with. He didn’t need to. One need only look at the devastating effect of the Ford-Rockefeller program of economic austerity and belt-tightening on the mass of the people to understand why the workers voted the way they did.
It is true that Carter sought to project a vague image of himself as leading a new coalition something like that of Roosevelt in the early thirties, one that would “turn the country around” and “bring it back to economic health.” It’s for this reason that issues like the Playboy matter, the red-baiting on Eastern Europe (where Ford and Carter tried to outdo each other), and even Watergate were marginal in the campaign, with the polls showing only 5 percent of the voters (the extreme right-wing) “concerned” over the first two.
It was the economic situation, the desperate plight of many millions and the insecurity of many more worried over their job status, threatened by the high cost of living, and drained by extortionate taxes that in the final analysis provided the impetus to turn the Ford administration out of office.
Knowing that the economic situation was the key to the election, the Ford forces pursued a strategy of winning over as large a section as possible of the middle class, especially the lower middle class. Many of them, along with sections of the higher-paid white workers, were frightened into believing that the Carter promises to improve the lot of the low-income section of the population, especially the unemployed, would be paid for out of their pockets alone.
Carter deliberately failed to speak out against the “big interests,” that is, the monopolists. He never came up with even a hint of a program that would shift the weight of the capitalist crisis onto the ruling class.
Carter spoke in generalities about closing tax loopholes for the rich, but specifically denied that he had any intentions of reforming the tax structure – which is so weighted in favor of the really wealthy. At no time could he get himself to definitely reassure the middle class that any program he would develop would be at the expense of the large monopolies.
How could he, being a capitalist himself?
It’s important to compare the situation that will confront Carter when he takes over in January with the conditions when Roosevelt came in during the early 1930s.
When Roosevelt took over, history’s worst capitalist economic crisis was raging; the economy reached bottom just around the time he was inaugurated.
At that time, it must be remembered, the U.S. had no large military establishment spread around the globe – as it has today. The military-industrial complex of that period was only embryonic in comparison with today’s.
There were no hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in Europe and Asia. While troops were sent to Latin America, the size of the military in general did not require the mammoth arms industry that exists today.
Six years after Roosevelt took over, the Universal Military Training Law – the draft – was passed. Until then, the armed forces of the U.S., except for the Navy, were small in comparison with those of the other capitalist countries.
At that time, Roosevelt could enact social legislation long overdue by the standards of a developed capitalist country. This wasn’t done out of magnanimity or “compassion,” as the Carter forces put it in the current campaign. It was then aptly called “riot insurance” and came in anticipation of a new and genuinely broad resurgence of the American labor movement.
When Roosevelt took over, the ruling class itself was desperately seeking new stimulative economic measures, even of the most artificial kind, to start a new cycle of capitalist development.
At that time the big banks, particularly the Rockefeller dynasty, in combination with some of the industrialists and light industry, were proponents of artificial stimulants being injected into the economy by the government. Today, however, it is the same Rockefeller group in common with all the big banks who are strenuously opposed to such measures.
In Roosevelt’s time it was something of a novelty in this country to introduce state capitalist measures, that is, the direct intervention of the capitalist state into the economic process. It was done in various ways: by “priming the pump,” that is, monetary expansion or the so-called easy money policy, and through make-work projects like the WPA, the CCC camps, and others.
Even so, the economic recovery began to peter out within a couple of years, even during Roosevelt’s first administration.
Even during the high point of the Rooseveltian recovery, there were millions unemployed. It was the turn to militarism, and to an aggressive foreign policy in the economic sphere, that accounted for the limited recovery.
Viewed in in historical perspective, capitalism never really achieved a normal, automatic recovery from the Great Depression. It resumed growth only under the incubus of imperialist militarism. The catastrophic economic crisis of the 1930s was a paralyzing stroke from which monopoly capitalism never fully recovered.
The Carter administration will be taking office at a time when the limited economic recovery begun in 1975 has already petered out.
That recovery, such as it was, started about a year ago and soon began to slowly lose steam. This was visible by the early part of the summer; by the middle of October the Ford administration could no longer hide the fact that its economic recovery was grinding to a halt. All efforts by the Ford administration to put a good face on the economy fell flat and the slow-down could no longer be denied.
So thus, when the Carter administration takes over, it will be faced with a new recession actually in progress.
Can the new administration start a new cycle of capitalist development? Such a cycle can’t be started artificially. Stimulative measures such as the ones enacted by Roosevelt can accelerate a cycle of capitalist development, but only when it is already on the way. And, of course, restrictive measures can retard it.
This is not to exclude the possibility of a limited recovery. On the contrary, one is inevitable.
But the big difference between now and the 1930s is that any recovery that takes place will be in the context of continued general economic stagnation throughout the entire capitalist world.
Moreover, the huge outlays of money and labor which go into the kind of parasitic production engendered by the military-industrial complex – and earlier acted as a stimulus to capitalist production, especially in the days of U.S. imperialist expansion following the Second World War – are counter-productive under existing world conditions.
Thus the Carter administration has at its disposal two types of instrumentalities to deal with the basic problem of the capitalist economic crisis. It can continue the restrictive, austerity-type measures vigorously pushed by the Ford administration which increased the massive unemployment inevitably growing out of capitalist recession.
Or it can resort to artificial stimulants at a time when the capitalist system is already shot through and through with them.
In either case, the prospects are not for a thriving economic upsurge.
The likelihood, therefore, is that the Carter administration will speed up the process of militarization. A more aggressive foreign policy seems in the offing and not far away.
Last updated: 11 May 2026