Political Report of the Standing Committee of the League
of Revolutionaries for a New America,
February 2008

 

“No matter where people fall in their discontent with politics today, most are not exactly sure what to do about it. This presents revolutionaries with the opportunity to explain the growing polarization and its economic roots, and to present a resolution to the problems people face. As discontent begins to be expressed and people are pulled into political motion, the electoral process is creating the opportunity to break the ideological and political connections that tie the workers to the capitalists.”
– “Unite the Revolutionaries, Win Them to Communism”, Rally, Comrades! January/February 2008

 

As the recent LRNA Standing Committee report “Prepare Now for Battles Ahead” makes clear, “the outlines of political polarization are coming into focus. These beginning phases of political polarization frame our tasks, our work, and our policy.” (Rally, Comrades! January/February 2008). The candidates are talking about the issues that concern the American people – the war, the economy, healthcare, and immigration – but their solutions are those which advance the interests of the ruling class. At the same time, the growing economic and social polarization is creating opportunities for real change. The ruling class has its program and is using the elections to move it forward. Our class also has its program and revolutionaries must use the elections to put forward that program.

 

Political and Economic Situation

 

The interests and goals of the ruling class are the same no matter who wins the Presidential election – the continued advance of globalization, the struggle of the U.S. to dominate that process, and the fight to assert its geopolitical interests in the world. Having accomplished much of what it set out to do with the so-called Washington Consensus, the ruling class is now faced with an unstable global economy, growing competition between the nations for markets and geopolitical power, the unraveling of the world's societies, and a kind of poverty unknown in human history. They face profound questions – how will they sustain a market economy without consumers who can buy? Having dismantled governmental mechanisms, what will they use to intervene to assist in sustaining this market? Neo-liberalism – once the watchword of an emerging global ruling class – is increasingly discredited and the search is on for an alternative to take the globalized world the next step forward.

The future President will have to take the U.S. through the next stage of development of this process. This will include a world that is far more economically integrated, in which China, Russia, and India are emerging as economic powerhouses, and an increasing number of nations are making alliances with one another to protect themselves from U.S. economic or military domination. At home, the new President will have to handle the political implications of an American people who inevitably will be thrown into poverty with little hope of recovery.

The world cannot go back to what it was, no matter how much the American people yearn for the “good old days." The rapid pace of globalization, the intensifying impact of labor-replacing technology, and the real social and institutional destruction that has taken place in the last ten to 15 years has taken care of that.

The Presidential candidates are talking change, but these changes will only help the ruling class protect private property under these changing world conditions. Their positions represent different tactical proposals to allow the capitalists to more effectively deal with the stage of development of the global economy and to manage the inevitable social and political discontent. They also reflect differences about which part of the citizenry it will be necessary to have “on board” to rule. The solutions, ranging from foreign policy – protecting the permanent interests of the U.S. – to how to cut deeper into the social safety net without social and infrastructural consequences, seek to preserve the existing order regardless of the cost to humanity.

Even with all their machinations and intrigues, however, the ruling class and its representatives cannot escape the hard realities of the qualitative changes in the economy. Broader sections of society are being entangled in its disastrous results, undercutting the Parties’ respective bases, and bringing to the surface the inevitable clash of the contradictions between a people that cannot live without money and a world that runs on nothing else. No candidate is speaking to this, and no candidate dares.

Consciousness of the need for an independent class program that rests on the demands of the most impoverished, and a strategy to achieve that program is the only path to solving the problems we face today. The ruling class is being forced on to the strategic defensive, and revolutionaries must take advantage of that opening to educate and win the emerging new class over to the cooperative communist solution of the problem.

 

“Change” and the Mood of the People

 

The demand for change is present in every pendulum swing of the bourgeois electoral process. The objective conditions make the difference between being forced to remain in the same old mold and having the opportunity to break out and take a step toward something new. The increased turnout in many of the primaries reflected the feeling that change is not only necessary, but possible. All the candidates have dangerous populist elements, but all of them are bringing people into the electoral process, and this is also part of the objective revolutionary process.

There is little sense, however, of what kind of change we need to have. Many believe that everything will get better if we can just get beyond the Bush era. Many just have a sense that any kind of change is positive. In their desire for change many hear what they want to hear from general populist statements. They don’t stop to analyze these demagogic appeals. They don’t analyze the situation in class terms. A recent poll, for example, found that a majority of Americans see the government as the problem, while less than a quarter of those surveyed lay the blame at the feet of the corporations. More than anything, activity and enthusiasm tend to be with the individual candidate, rather than with that person’s program, or a practical knowledge of the implications of that individual’s proposed solutions.

As in everything in American politics, race and gender cannot be ignored. Here too, program – the real solutions to the problems people face – has been overshadowed by a focus on the individual candidate, rather than what they propose to do. The ruling class is playing the race and gender card both ways. Obama and Clinton are both on the right wing of their party, each with a retinue of advisors and policy makers with proven records of defending U.S. hegemonic interests in the world, and protecting corporate interests over the interests of the American people.

Nevertheless, identity politics is being used to present them as the face of progressive change.

This has been effective both in quieting complaints from the left, and manipulating the decency and aspirations of the American people. In Iowa, many people came out to the caucuses, not only out of opposition to Bush, but also because of the fact that Obama would be the first African-American Presidential candidate, and Clinton the first woman candidate. Some saw their vote for Clinton or Obama as a vote against the religious right or against racism.

We can also see how the candidates are being used to line up their different identity groups behind the interests of the ruling class. In Chicago, for example, the black media is overwhelmingly in support of Obama. Questions about his program can result in accusations of racism or some kind of race treachery. Yet, in the same city, as well as others around the nation, nothing is being said about the growing attack against the black masses or the lack of solutions from any of the candidates to address these problems. The unity being called for is unity around the interests of the ruling class, not the masses of blacks or around the class of which they are a part. As long as there is no general consciousness of class interests, the ruling class will continue to be able to use identity politics – organized around the historical centrality of the African American question – to consolidate their own class and lay the foundation for attacking the growing class of dispossessed, regardless of color.

 

Opportunities and Pitfalls

 

The American people are desperate for a resolution to their problems, but not one of the candidates is presenting a program to solve those problems in the interests of the majority of the country. The candidates do have solutions, but these solutions are intended to remedy the capitalists’ problems. They are forced, for the time being, to appeal to the masses for votes, but their true intentions are veiled behind the populist, sentimental and nostalgic rhetoric that promises a return to a golden past. This is not an absence of program. It is an opposite program, hostile to the interests of our class.

The election process provides an opportunity for the ruling class to propagandize the American people on their program, which is essentially, at root, a program for fascism. Some people are calling what’s going on in our country fascism, and are speaking out against it. But there is no organized solution to it, no political representation of even the majority of people, let alone the interests of the class. At the same time, the ruling class is taking steps to protect its interests. Various forces are being used to create a broad support for those interests, and we have noted the role the anti-immigration movement is playing in that. The goal of the ruling class is to disorient and disorganize its opposition while fostering the social base for fascism. The process by which it achieves this, and with what forces, and at what moment, is rooted in history or a response to opportunity.

The worsening situation will be fertile ground for all kinds of appeals, from the left and the right, aimed at organizing that discontent into some kind of political expression. Impulses in this direction range from efforts to capture the discontented elements of the right and left, as well as forging new ground with political rule by transcending the old Parties. Multi-millionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and various other influential Republicans and Democrats, for example, have been discussing the possibility of forming a party of “national unity” which would bring the two parties together, and there is talk that Bloomberg will run as their candidate with former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn as the Vice-Presidential candidate. These and the other forces set into motion are unsettled by the turn of events, are arising within the flux of the electoral process, and are an expression of the polarization taking place in society.

We can expect various impulses in the wake of the election as well. We can’t predict what form they will take, but if we hold to our understanding of the process, we can keep our orientation. Polarization is arising on the basis of the profound social destruction and is the motion in which the battle for a new society will take place. The League has to be in the position to understand the meaning of the events as they unfold and to participate in such a way that will pull the struggle forward in the interests of our class. The League has to speak out against the rising fascism and show that fascism will not be defeated by "fighting the right," but only through fighting for a class program within the developing social struggle. In this way, the League can engage with the revolutionaries and carry out its mission.

Philosophical understanding, coupled with the reports from various fronts of struggle, shows that now is the time for presenting a resolution to the problem. This is not simply because someone says so, but because people are demanding it. There is no alternative out there, and that’s what the League can provide. The League can show how the underlying economic causes, the changes in the state, and the growing unity between the corporations and the government are designed to benefit a class whose interests are hostile to ours. We can put forward a program for the resolution of the problem, a vision of different kind of society, and a strategy to get there. We can offer specific political tactics to take the movement each step toward what it is really fighting for. Everywhere people are discussing and debating the future of this country. Let us not miss this opportunity to take our country one step closer to the society we know is not only necessary, but possible.

 

May.2008.Vol18.Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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