Editor’s note: Excerpted from the March 2005 report of The LRNA Steering Committee.

America is heading toward  a class confrontation. Every facet of society is beginning to polarize. Underlying it all is the qualitative change in the economy and the resulting antagonism between wealth and poverty. Polarization — the separation and destruction of the bonds that hold a process together — is a focal point for revolutionaries. Social transformation cannot take place without it. The polarization we are seeing today offers the opportunity for a historically new class movement for a cooperative world. For the process to reach fruition revolutionaries must provide the ideology, vision and scientific strategy needed to break the myriad of ideological and organizational bonds that tie the class to capitalism, freeing it to become a class for itself. This quantitative stage of the revolutionary process will be expressed in the class breaking its acceptance of capitalism and creating its own political party. Populism remains one of the main ideological weapons the rulers are using to prevent this from happening.

Populism in American history

The most important aspect of U.S. populism is its non-class outlook. This idea is based on the proposition from the 1776 Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and it has been reinforced by the specific history of the U.S.. This history has included political movements for reform in which sections of different classes have found themselves in temporary political alliances.

The kernel of populist ideology is the idea of “the people” fighting some big institution like the banks, the rich, and the government bureaucracy. Populism groups together sections of the capitalist class, the “middle class” and the workers under one banner. Ideologically, populism is never directed against the capitalist system. It rejects the idea that the working class has interests absolutely hostile to those of the capitalist class.

The movement most commonly associated with the rise of populism is the struggle of the small farmers from the 1890s through the 1930s. Their fight was directed at the railroads, large banks, and large agricultural commodity corporations. It was a movement of poor farmers, small rural businessmen, and some sections of the working class.

The populist movement during this period showed all the dangers that populism held for a revolutionary movement. While some sections of this movement were quite progressive and militant in opposition to the banks, railroads and stock exchanges, they never fundamentally challenged capitalism as a system. Populism in the main was an all-class white unity movement. The populist movement was incorporated into the Democratic Party during the New Deal and the years following World War II.

When the capitalists deal with the workers today, they appeal to that complex of populist ideas that have been entrenched in the U.S. experience. In this sense, populism is not one of many “ruling class ideologies,” but is rather a central means by which the workers are politically manipulated to achieve the capitalists’ ends of either attacking other capitalists or getting the workers to attack one another, or both.

Today the economic factors — the growing and irreversible polarization of wealth and poverty brought about by labor replacing technology, the inevitable motion toward an economic crisis, the growth of other countries which seek to undercut the U.S. position, the formation of a new class of dispossessed in the U.S. and across the world – are combining to create an extremely volatile situation. As the U.S. aggressively attempts to impose its will on the world stage, it must crack down at home to guarantee the American people do not resist the capitalists’ plans.

Globalization has spelled the end to any progressive all-class or cross-class movement. President Bush’s bringing “democracy” to the world is the current ploy to adapt to the needs of global capital. It is the same ploy at home in the U.S. — democracy without liberty and equality — without equal access to food, housing, health care or other means of life.

By itself populism has no magical power to influence the mass movement. Populism under conditions of capitalist expansion was different than populism under the present conditions of impending economic crisis. Populism was an ideology based on reformism when reforms under capitalism were possible. While it is still possible to beat concessions out of the capitalists (and important to do so), these victories are temporary. U.S. capitalism today, locked into deepening crisis, offers no more reforms. The qualitative changes in the economy, the polarization of wealth and poverty and the widespread social destruction demand that the capitalists create a different form of populism. The goal of populism today is to build unity against the new revolutionary class.

We have entered the period of class war. Any attempts to do away with the class character of the emerging struggle are ploys of fascism. Populism is a political tactic of the capitalist class. It is their class response to the growing spontaneous movement, their attempt to prevent political polarization.

How populism is expressing itself today

The Democratic Party is reviving itself within this changing environment as the command center of populism. They intend to use populism to confuse and control the leaders of the growing movement. The Democrats aim to prevent political polarization and the consciousness of the urgent need for a class party. The drive of the rulers to destroy all remaining social programs, along with the rapid pace of fascism, makes their activity a threat to the survival of the class.

This is not the Roosevelt period where the laws of capitalist development were based on the quantitative expansion of the market. Then, the Roosevelt grouping extended social bribery to insure loyalty when the war broke out. Roosevelt’s New Deal gave them control over the growing movement and an ideological weapon to use against the increasingly popular ideas of socialism. The working class has been socially, politically and organizationally tied to the twin parties of capital ever since, and through them to the rulers. Today, social bribery is ending. The Democrats, in this period, have only populism to offer the workers. They are trying to craft it to fit the needs of this new period.

Each time the class expresses itself independently, Democrats move in to contain things. The struggle is narrowed, often destroyed by painting it as ethnic rather than as an attack on the class and all of society. A class party can be built out of all these struggles today, and the Democratic Party knows this.

There are many social forces maneuvering within and outside of this process, debating everything from which way for the trade unions, to what kind of poverty movement there will be, to whether a workers’ party is needed. The real question is, which ideology – capitalist or communist – will express and guide this movement? This is the crucial question and what polarity is about. It is the opportunity to introduce new ideas.

No matter what the rulers or their agents within the class do they cannot address the underlying problem –  the economic revolution, the growing poverty and the emergence of a class of impoverished who have no future in the capitalist system. The capitalists seek to keep this class ignorant of its real interests and mislead it with populist propaganda. Revolutionaries, on the other hand, disseminate the necessity for them to identify with their class and to be conscious of  their program of communism.

The rulers and their twin parties may bicker over how to maintain their wealth in a changing world, but they are unified in the need to crush any political motion that is independent of them. There is no progressive left wing of the Democratic Party. It is a capitalist party and its program is no different than the Republicans. But in the absence of targeted communist agitation that points the workers toward the next step and propaganda that brings a vision of the new world, the treacherous role of the Democrats and their misleaders can only intensify.

As the history of populism shows, the capitalists are skilled in capturing discontent and turning it into a movement that destroys itself and keeps private property intact. In America, every impulse toward an independent motion has eventually been taken over by the capitalists. Fascism is on  the horizon as the ultimate means by which the rulers intend to contain the growing struggle for survival. The only hope is the formation of a class party that becomes an organizing center for the ensuing class battles, and the formation of an organization of revolutionaries that can ensure the future of the movement.

Tasks of Revolutionaries

Our strategy is to make the class conscious and our tactic is to break the workers away from the Democratic Party. We do not throw the blow directly at Bush. We throw our blow at the center of gravity — those who have gained through bribery the organizational, political and ideological control of the workers, those who have the potential to prevent the struggle from unfolding. The Democratic Party’s weak link is those misleaders who connect the class to the Party and through it to the capitalist institutions and ideology (superstructure). These misleaders are vulnerable. A class party that becomes an organizing center of the class can help break those bonds.

But times demand that we get specific. We do this by demonstrating that we have answers to the practical problems workers are struggling with, and use our press as a weapon to lead and reach the revolutionaries. We must ensure that our agitation and propaganda in every instance proceeds from the interests of the class. Everything we say and do must facilitate the growing political polarity.

 

May.2007.Vol17.Ed3
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