Big Business Faces a No-Win Election in 2024
Donald Trump may pose the greatest threat to global capitalism, but Joe Biden Part Deux also bodes ill for the future of free trade and free enterprise.
For business, which one is the lesser of two evils?
Photographer: Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images
Karl Marx’s biggest mistake was to overestimate the power and cunning of the capitalist class. Marx posited that the state is nothing more than the executive committee of the ruling class — and that politicians are mere playthings of capitalist forces. Whoever the deluded masses vote for, be it liberal Tweedledee or conservative Tweedledum, they end up with an agent of global capital.
If only! In the 2024 US presidential election, the business elite faces a choice between two threats to global capitalism. Donald Trump is undoubtedly the biggest threat — a serial lawbreaker (91 felony counts so far) who brings chaos everywhere he goes and sucks up to foreign dictators. He may well take a wrecking ball to the global architecture of defense-and-trade (NATO and the World Trade Organization) that has guaranteed the success of the postwar capitalist order.