Midterms: Trump beaten on the cost of living, and the American model too

According to Mediapart, the US midterm elections were largely decided on economic and social questions. Donald Trump, the site writes, was unable to grasp the living-standards crisis and resolve it, a crisis that would be the product of the American economic model. That is all the dispatch tells us: no figures, no detailed results, no specific measures. We will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Mediapart's sentence nonetheless contains the essential point: the crisis is a product of the model. In other words, it is not a breakdown you fix by changing mechanics. If living standards are falling, the Marxist question is the most prosaic one there is: where does the value created go? A wage covers the cost of reproducing the labour force; the work performed goes beyond that, and this surplus, surplus value, becomes profit. When prices rise faster than incomes, it is because the slice of the cake is tilting one way. Households do not "suffer" inflation like the weather: they pay prices set by companies, banks and states.

This is where market commentary becomes comic. We are told that "prices are rising" and that "the economy is slowing", as if these entities had a life of their own. It is commodity fetishism in television form: relations between people appear as relations between things, and nobody ever decided anything. A president can then promise to tame these natural forces, and express surprise, or rather apologise, when they refuse to obey.

A second problem for any government that genuinely wanted to raise living standards: it runs into the logic of accumulation. Raising real wages means eroding profitability. Central banks know this well, which is why they are in the habit of "cooling the labour market", an elegant phrase for keeping an army of unemployed in reserve to temper wage demands. A government that wants both the favour of voters and that of capital promises the one and protects the other.

We can therefore doubt that the problem lies solely with Donald Trump the individual. Our hypothesis, which the dispatch does not allow us to verify, is that no change of managers resolves what is rooted in the structure: an economy where productivity gains go to profits, where precariousness serves as a regulator, and where every crisis is resolved by shifting the bill downwards.

What we still do not know: the scale of the electoral rebuke, the economic measures Trump had put forward, and what his opponents concretely propose. If the latter merely promise better management of the same model, the next election could well replay the same play, with different actors.