The world is changing. Sometime in 2008, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is expected to become the very richest of the world’s 800 billionaires, moving up from his current position close behind Bill Gates. Toyota recently surpassed GM as the world's leading carmaker. China replaced the United States as Japan's biggest trade partner and became the United States’ second biggest trade partner. Financial speculators invest in the debt of bankrupt manufacturing companies. Capitalism in the age of the new digital technology produced a hundred new billionaires last year; three billion people, nearly half the world, lived on less than $2 per day.

The world is changing radically and rapidly. One of the most critical consequences of these changes is a low rumbling awareness in the U.S. This is not a politically clear awareness. Nor is it particularly well articulated. It is scattered, uneven, and tentative. What is significant is that it reveals a key weakness of the capitalist class in the U.S. – its growing inability to maintain the façade and lie of the unity of interests of all classes.

We revolutionaries greet this rising and widening awareness as an opportunity to carry out our political responsibilities. Revolutionaries who are rooted in the struggles over daily traumas, life-changing layoffs, and local school closings can politicize this awakening. From the standpoint of the actual demands of the class expelled by the economy and abandoned by the government, revolutionaries can unite people with the actual resolution to their problems.

At the root of all these problems and battles is the basic reality that an economic system organized for the profit of the few off of the exploitation of the many cannot solve the problems of a new class whose labor has been replaced by robotics. Only the cooperative, communist reorganization of society with the common, public ownership of the means of production can meet the demands of this new class, and stop the destruction tearing through society as a whole.

This reality guides the work of revolutionaries. Therefore, we assess the rising and widening awareness, identify the strategically decisive points at which to connect, and focus our work to develop consciousness and build the League.

New awareness, new political opportunities

Wider and wider sections of the population are becoming aware that something is seriously wrong – not just with their lives, but with society as a whole. They may not understand the exact reasons why, but they know that the war is a lie and U.S. soldiers and Iraqi people are dying – for the corporations, not for democracy. They may not understand what to do about it, but they know that they cannot get medical care and that the people of the U.S. Gulf Coast got no protection from Hurricane Katrina. They know the government protects the needs and private property of the corporations.

Today’s scattered awakenings all express the growing anti-corporate sentiment and the realization that these problems are not temporary. This awareness expresses the end of economic stability for millions of U.S. workers. That stability provided the material basis for national unity, that is, the sense of common interests between the U.S. capitalist class and the U.S. working class that provided the foundation for the way the capitalist class ruled. With daily reports of massive lay-offs and more casualties in Iraq, we are beginning to see the erosion of the base of strength of the capitalist class and the erosion of the foundation for their old method of rule. At every turn, people face the immediate choice: Either the consolidation of the power of the corporations over society, or the power of society over the corporations.

As more people struggle for the basic necessities of life, a consciousness of their class interests is the greatest danger to capitalist rule. The ruling class will try to prevent the people from understanding their class interests and acting on them. From the ruling class, we will hear calls for unity – unity against terrorists, unity against illegal immigration, unity against crime. But the real issue is: Which class benefits from these calls? Capitalism cannot afford to answer that question.
In the climate of the national elections, the gravitational pull of presidential “politics” will be strong. Politics has long been equated in the American mind with voting and lobbying elected officials. But politics is more than elections; it is the struggle for power – to keep it or to get it.

Today, more and more people know that the corporations have all the clout – the political power to get what they need. As they feel the polarization of wealth, millions of Americans are also becoming aware of the intensifying polarization of power – that our government is actually of, by, and for the corporations. Every specific struggle confronts the naked rule of corporate power – a state that will go to any lengths to protect the capitalist system.

The keystone in the arch of ideology and organization that ties the workers politically to the capitalists is the Democratic Party. In 2004 and 2006 many serious activists, reacting to the crimes of the Bush administration, threw themselves into political activity supporting national Democratic candidates. In some arenas of struggle, discussion is still often focused on how to get Democrats to move on critical issues. But the country does not have to wait until 2008 for the sense of betrayal by the Democratic Party to set in. People already feel the Democratic Party is betraying them on the war and abandoning them as new laws and executive orders demolish the constitution and basic civil liberties.

Anger and loss does not automatically become political consciousness. Disillusionment with the corporate-controlled two-party system does not automatically lead to a class perspective. Scattered struggles do not automatically coalesce into a broad movement for change. Without an independent organizational center for class interests and agitation, isolated organizations will continue to operate around their individual agendas. Struggles to build such a center are continually undermined by a reliance on old ideas and old forms of struggle.

Unless and until people understand the cause of their problems and embrace the solution, there will always be the danger of misdirection. Candidates and pundits are fine-tuning their attempts to aim the awakening anger against immigrants in the U.S. and against the people of various countries abroad. The ruling class recognizes that the economic foundation for their hold over the American people is weakening. They have the resources to misdirect the growing anger of the American people into a mass base for a fascist movement.

Tasks of Revolutionaries

The base of strength of the capitalist class is the lie of the unity of interests of opposing classes. The critical crack in this base – the capitalist class's inability to maintain this lie – presents some important openings for revolutionary work.

At this moment, the widening awareness is concentrated in the industrial Rust Belt of the Midwest – where massive layoffs have devastated what used to be the industrial and ideological heartland of an expanding economy. But the anger, disillusionment, and outrage are widening to the small towns across the country that grieve for a disproportionate number of soldiers dying in Iraq. It is spreading to communities across the country where local fights for education or clean water expose the new regime of the corporate control over every natural resource and public function of society. Laid off autoworkers understand they will never recover their old way of comfortable living – or even basic health care coverage.

Anger at the corporations as the enemy is growing, but people need more than anger. They also need a sense of who they are and what they are for. The ever-present corporations present the opening to politicize that anger and develop a sense of identity and interests as a class opposed to the corporations and the whole capitalist class.

The anger, moral outrage, and sense of urgency also open up the possibility to take the thinking outside the box and envision something qualitatively different – to quit the politics of begging and take up the politics of class. Revolutionaries rooted deep in the actual struggles – the messy, street-level struggles – can show that the demands of these struggles can only be met if people have the political power to do so. Turning the private property of the corporations into public property and using the abundance that can be produced to benefit the people of the world becomes clear as a real solution to real problems.
In order to take advantage of these openings, revolutionaries have to critically evaluate their style of work. An historical context is the starting point. As long as the capitalist system was expanding, it could meet the needs of the majority and rely on their passivity in order to rule the whole country. The best that revolutionaries could do was to group themselves around a set of ideas and beliefs and try to convince other people. As long as the goals of revolutionaries were different from the actual life-and-death needs of the vast majority of the American working class, that style of work was the only route possible.

Things are different today. Every specific problem people are reacting to expresses the fundamental transformation at the foundation of society – and the fact that capitalism cannot feed people whose labor it does not need. Every struggle for what people need is blocked by a state that is shamelessly in the hands of the corporations that profit off war and destruction. Therefore, revolutionaries can meet the growing awareness on very specific fronts. Today people need real answers to real problems.

The tasks of revolutionaries flow from how revolutions happen. Revolution is neither a single moment nor the product of the thinking of revolutionaries. It is the process whereby society reacts to and ultimately resolves the problems caused by something qualitatively new that disrupts its old way of functioning. Revolution begins when society is disrupted, but it is not complete until a different class has the political power to reorganize society. Therefore, the first step is breaking the stranglehold of the class enemy’s way of thinking and ushering in the new thinking. In order to defeat what is standing in their way, people need to be able to envision something fundamentally different and how to get the power to achieve that vision.

Revolutionaries cannot accomplish this if they proceed from the standpoint of a separate set of ideas and beliefs isolated from what people are experiencing and thinking. This is not to say that revolutionaries throw their scientific and political understanding out the window. It means that we start from the actual demands of the class expelled by the economy and abandoned by the government. It means we assess the demands, anger, sense of betrayal and loss – in whatever forms they present themselves – in order to put them back out in a way that leads from the perceptions, toward the actual resolution. As we establish an active relationship with the revolutionaries trying to develop the thinking of the people on a specific front, we can build a League organization deeply rooted in the fiber of American society.
Revolutionaries approach their tasks with the sense that what we do makes a difference. Whether in Russia or France or elsewhere – by different routes and in different forms – the discontent with the current situation is being steered into a growing nationalism – with all the dangers that alarmed people on the eve of Hitler’s rise. It’s a different world today. The dangers of war and fascism today stand on a different foundation than they did before World War II, but the tasks are just as urgent and the stakes are even higher. U.S. revolutionaries shoulder a heavy responsibility.

As the voice of Tom Paine inspired the first American revolutionaries, as the voices of the abolitionists stirred the country almost a hundred years later, revolutionaries today can inspire the America people to reclaim their country and their lives.

 

July.2007.Vol17.Ed4
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