Soaring food prices create mass starvation, while agribusiness gets billions in subsidies. Homes have no running water, while giant corporations privatize the world's water. People die from a lack of health care, while the profits of the pharmaceutical companies skyrocket. Today, every social problem people face poses the question: how will society be organized? Will it be organized around the power of the corporations over society — or around the power of society over the corporations?

The answer depends on what people think and do. For this reason, revolutionaries focus their attention on how to help change people's thinking.

As in any war, the first step is clarity about what and whom we are fighting and what we are fighting for. This is achieved in the process of fighting for the next inevitable step in the revolutionary process. For example, during the 1930s, the political development of the working class depended on its social unity. Therefore, the fight for African American equality was the inevitable next step in the struggle. Various sections of society were thrown into that struggle. For the revolutionaries, this was the battlefield and the place where they built and stabilized their organizations.

Today, the question facing revolutionaries is: what is the inevitable next battle of this stage of the revolution? It is to prevent the corporations from taking over society. Control of the government is their key weapon. The first fight, then, is to break the grip of corporate power. This battle is already shaping up with the federal government bailing out troubled corporations, while disregarding the deteriorating conditions of the people.

Role of Revolutionaries

Revolutionary politics is the art of relying on the spontaneous movement to accomplish political goals. Revolutionaries assess the inevitable next step in order to position themselves for their role as leaders and teachers before the battle begins.

This article will discuss why the struggle for nationalization is a key battlefield where the fight to take over the corporations can move the struggle along toward communism. It is a classroom where revolutionaries teach class-consciousness. We haave to prepare for it now. Nationalization places the corporations under the control or ownership of the government. Then the fight is: in whose interest will nationalization proceed?

Nationalization is not someone's good idea. It flows from history. It is forced on society by objective conditions. It is the summation of what both the rulers and the workers are objectively fighting for today.

Revolutionary Tactics

The rapidly expanding economic crisis is creating awareness that the hardship workers face is more than an individual failure. For example, the 70,000 Detroit families who face foreclosure and homelessness know they are not alone. Last fall, the UAW negotiated a contract that for the first time allowed new hires to work for less than half of the prevailing wages and benefits. Which way will they turn? Without consciousness, people can easily be pulled into support of war and fascism, which is on the horizon. The new situation opens up opportunities for revolutionaries to draw class lines and to develop people politically. It's time to develop tactics.

Tactics are a plan for turning the spontaneous movement for the basic necessities of life — for food, housing, health care, education and energy — against the enemy and in the direction of a strategic goal. This is true for the communists and for the fascists.

Revolutionary tactics direct this social motion toward the strategic goal of social ownership of the socially necessary means of production. Therefore our tactics draw the masses into political activity, opening up opportunities for revolutionaries to educate a large section of workers to be anti-capitalist and pro-communist.

Tactics must be tailored to the current level of consciousness of the workers and the stage of development of the revolutionary movement. Putting nationalization forward as a tactic sets the conditions to develop consciousness and moves people into a struggle not only against the government, but also into a battle to force the government to act as their government.

The Demand for Nationalization

Nationalization is nothing new. Every revolution has dealt with it. After the Revolutionary War for independence, this country needed an army. The army was nationalized. A national currency was needed, so the currency was nationalized. Then the postal system was nationalized. During the Eisenhower years, the freeways were nationalized. In the days ahead, and as the economy deteriorates, there will be more calls for nationalization. Although the bourgeoisie utilizes nationalization when nationalization serves its interests and discards it when it doesn't, revolutionaries dare not leave this battlefield to the enemy.

This battleground is opening up today because the economy is compelling both the masses and the rulers to nationalize key industries, although for different reasons. On the one hand, some industries are simply unable to manage their own economic affairs and the capitalists must therefore work to stabilize private property relations through nationalization. This is seen today in the bank crisis and in the effort to nationalize a chunk of the insurance industry that covers major storm damage claims. On the other hand, the masses demand government assistance (and, eventually, nationalization) in order to secure their basic necessities.

The fight for the conversion of some corporations to governmental control is a bridge, an intermediate step between what people understand and are beginning to fight for today, and the larger understanding that the struggle to build a communal economy is the ultimate solution.

The struggle for nationalization allows the people to ask why the government has no qualms about maintaining the well being of the corporate giants, but refuses to provide them with education, housing, and health care. The struggle for nationalization allows the people to ask why they are forced to pay whatever the price-fixing energy conglomerates charge. Revolutionaries can then pose the question: why do these conglomerates have the right to own the country's natural resources? Revolutionaries can show that there is no way to control these corporations except through public ownership.

Teaching as We Fight

To pull consciousness forward, revolutionaries rely on and proceed from both the objective demands and the sentiments of the people that flow from history. The American people have a deep-seated belief in the democratic process. They believe that this government is their government and that the officials they elect to office are supposed to represent their interests. Whether this is true, or not, is not the point. The point is that the corporations and the government can be exposed by the demand for nationalization. In the process, the masses can be educated to the actuality that globalization and robotics make it impossible for the private sector to provide the necessities of life and that a new economic system is needed.

For example, combatants in the housing arena are fighting to force the government to take some responsibility for their well being. The government is steadily gobbling up mountains of vacant real estate and putting these properties on the market as investment opportunities for corporate interests. Under nationalization, these properties could be rented out for a nominal fee to those who need them. The battle lines are drawn. Nationalization of housing is the next step forward. The current housing crisis opens up opportunities for drawing people into political struggle. This political work sets the basis for the introduction of new ideas about the ultimate solution in a new society.

In Detroit the struggle to stop the privatization of water is escalating. Over 45,000 homes are now without running water. The people demand that the government distribute water at affordable rates. However, this cannot be done without nationalizing in the interests of the people those corporations that are buying up the world's water. By the people making sensible demands that the government refuses to accept, and by revolutionaries playing their educational role within this battle, Detroit's fighters are coming to understand the class nature of the government.

As the above examples illustrate, the demand for nationalization flows from the struggle. In this sense, it is objective. As such, it allows revolutionaries to show there is no way to control these corporations except through public ownership. The only alternative is a true people's government. But, first we have to get rid of this system. The first step toward that end is for workers to begin placing demands on the government.

Summation

For the first time in U.S. history, it is possible to achieve a communist America. Today, new labor-replacing technology is permanently eliminating work and destroying the foundation of the capitalist system. Step by step, a whole new class of people hit by the electronic revolution is being forced out of the capitalist system. This new social force is the key to social transformation. If clear on its historic role, it can pull society toward the vision of a democratic and peaceful world.

Today, everything depends on whether revolutionaries are positioned within the approaching battles, raising things in advance of economic or political changes, and preparing the people for the coming struggles. The tactic of calling for nationalization leads the people into the political struggle against the government on the basis of their class interests, where they can learn from their own experience. With conscious revolutionaries politicizing these battles, the people will come to see that their livelihood depends on actually taking over the corporations and creating a new society where the world of plenty that exists today can be distributed to all based on their needs.

The political demand must be: since the corporations can't or won't provide for the people, then the government must. Ultimately, society either brings these corporations under its control or the corporations will control society -- with all the devastating consequences. There is no middle ground left.

As the economy teeters on the verge of catastrophe, as people's lives are devastated, and as the U.S. pulls the world toward disastrous war, the question at stake in each battle is: in the interest of what class will these problems be resolved?

Revolutionaries must use their theoretical clarity to illuminate the path forward. But winning the battle for the masses to take up the political struggle, depends on art and skill. It depends on revolutionaries who are clear about what's at stake, drawing people into the struggle in their own class interests.

In this way, revolutionaries proceed from a general understanding of the need for communism to developing the practical steps for society to take over the corporations. History and the current conditions determine what we are fighting for. Revolutionaries at the various fronts of struggle determine how to wage that fight.

 

October.2008.Vol18.Ed5
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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