Out of the intensifying polarization of wealth and poverty is emerging a new round of struggle. To point forward, revolutionaries have to know what the problem is, what the movement is up against, and where it has to go. When something new begins, it is possible to do things not previously possible. If revolutionaries grasp what’s new and arising, we can work within the movement, at each step pointing the way forward.

In the polarization between the dispossessed masses and the affluent capitalists, the thunder of the social revolution can be heard worldwide. Today, 567 million people live in countries whose gross domestic product is less than the wealth of the world’s seven richest people combined. More than one billion people worldwide are hunger-stricken.

Forty-nine million of those global hungry live in the U.S. Here the thunder of social revolution is threatening millions of once-secure lives and condemning millions more to a caste-like status of permanent unemployment and exclusion from decent education and health care. We hear the thunder of social revolution in the anger and fear, in the scattered battles for education and against foreclosures. We hear it in Detroit, Michigan, where families in 45,000 homes cannot afford running water. We hear it in big cities and in small towns where $28/hour jobs in the auto industry have turned to dust. Today’s “jobless recovery” leaves us with an official unemployment figure that broke the 10% rate in October 2009. Far worse, the unemployment rate for households in the lowest income group was a devastating 30.8% in the fourth quarter of 2009. For millions of Americans, the burning question is, will I find a job?

To answer this we have to understand what’s going on in the economy. Two simultaneous processes are going on. One is the crisis of over-production, the boom-to-bust cycles normal to a capitalist economy. The other is the revolution in the economy triggered by the new tools of robotics in the mode of production. During crises of overproduction, the capitalist class demands – and wins – concessions from the working class. Workers are pitted against each other in bidding wars over who can sacrifice the most – union workers against non-union workers, citizens against immigrants. Cities compete in giving tax breaks to keep a factory from moving. Then, soon after, the factories are closed because there is no market for what is being produced – or because it can be produced cheaper somewhere else.

Lessons of the past

The overwhelming lesson of this recent history of struggle is that the repeated groveling before private property is not the way forward. It’s time to do something different. In past crises, many workers went back to their old jobs. This time, most people know their old jobs were phased out. Some will get new jobs, but at lower wages. Millions are searching for answers to their devastation. What is the direction that both resists the further onslaught and points the way forward for society? There are all sorts of proposals for direction for the movement – many of them are wrong. The new situation calls for new direction.

What can be done?

The answer lies in understanding not only the economic but also the political changes. It lies in developing the political will – the consciousness of what the government is doing and who it serves, breaking the reliance on the parties and spokesmen of the ruling class.

The recession and 2008 financial crash showed that the market doesn’t work – not for selling cars and houses, for providing health care, or for getting heat and water to people’s homes. When labor-replacing technology makes it possible to produce so many more products than people have the money to buy, then the market doesn’t even work for the corporations and the global system of exchange. Government action – the billions of federal dollars that went to save the corporations, their profits, and the financial system – was an admission of the delusions of the system.

When the government stepped in openly for the owners of the corporations – and at the expense of the public as a whole – it was a wake-up call. In the face of rising medical costs and foreclosures, lower wages, greater hunger and massive layoffs, there was no bailout for the American people. The natural reaction was anger and outrage. We are already faced with a moral question. The right of everyone to food, homes, medical care, education, and clean drinking water is a higher right than the right of private property to make money off the misery of millions.

When the market can no longer guarantee the profits of the corporations and the government steps in to protect them, that also raises the political question. In whose interests should government act – the public or the corporations? Revolutionaries have to reckon with this new situation. The movement can no longer rely on someone else to fight for its interests. The movement has to begin to struggle for a government that acts in the public interest. The daily, scattered battles can no longer be fought in isolation from the government’s political actions. The door is open for revolutionaries to begin to develop the political will of the movement – to take a decisive step along the path to the power to resolve these questions once and for all.

There are no easy or guaranteed answers. And there are plenty of dangers. Masses of people can continue to fight something they don’t understand; anger and fear can be agitated into a mass base for the fascist resolution to the current economic problems. But revolutionaries cannot stand passively on the sidelines. Guided by an analysis of the situation and the powerful forces the movement faces, we can understand the path to the final resolution and work through each stage along that path. Emboldened by the vision of a new cooperative society demanded by – and made possible by – the economic revolution, we can confidently push the movement forward from within, with each step taking it toward that ultimate conclusion.

May.2010.Vol20.Ed3
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