Millions are involved in valiant efforts to survive – or help others survive – because a system that once sustained them no longer can. From the growing lines at food stamp offices, to protests for education funding and health care and against bank bailouts or political corruption, they are faced with the question of “which way forward for the movement?”

The fight for what people need arises spontaneously from the conditions under which they live. It destabilizes old regimes that do not meet the needs of advancing the economy and society. New forces rise to challenge the existing power in society at times of crisis. That struggle for political power is the motive force, the engine that moves history forward.

Humanity is headed toward such a struggle. The growing reaction to objective changes in the economy is forcing those who fight for a new society to understand the two distinctly different concepts of the way forward that are projected for the struggles of which we are a part. One assumes power will remain in the hands of a few owners of great wealth, but that this owning class can be pressured into acting in the interest of humanity. The other prepares for the difficult struggle for a new social and economic order.

Most people still believe that better times will return. They see their task as fighting, and involving greater numbers of people in, the day-to-day struggle for particular objectives. If their struggle isn’t informed by an understanding of the objective path of history, the movement is going to be diverted into a thousand dead-end struggles.

Those who understand that better times cannot return, and that crisis offers the necessity and possibility of a new society, see the path ahead as political. They know they need to prepare the movement for a political struggle to challenge the existing class power in society. They are engaged in the difficult work of developing the strategy and organizational forms that can achieve the power necessary to shape the future.

What makes today different from the past?

The strategies of those who seek to lead the struggle to address the needs and demands of the American people arise from their experience and personal history. They are guided, too, by an understanding of how social change happens. Most of that experience has been in the context of an expanding economic system.

Our common experience has been shaped by the tensions between the needs and desires of the working class for a better life and the needs of the capitalist owners to make adjustments in the legal, social, and political system to retain power and develop the economy. In the first 70 years of the last century, that tension resulted in expanded civil rights, free public education and state university systems, a safe water supply, government-supported home ownership, union-won health care and the rest of the “American dream.”

The transition from labor-based industry to labor-replacing electronic production, though, has transformed every aspect of society. The old period of “re-forming” social, legal and political relationships that served to tie the working class into support of the capitalist system, ended 30 years ago. Most people still do not recognize the full import of this change.

The capitalists, though, know that they are engaged in a political battle over power and control and are taking steps to change how society is run. They are implementing a strategy to replace bribery and democracy (as limited as they were) by more direct control and a state prepared to do what’s necessary to preserve private property and maintain social stability in times of crisis.

As workers are thrown out of the system and dispossessed of what they had gained, their ties to capital are broken. They become more open to considering other possibilities, including a world that isn’t controlled in the interest of just one percent of the population. Their own experience begins to show them that the path of reform is blocked. But what lies ahead?

History has closed one road to a better life, but has opened another. Labor-replacing technology has created the conditions for a world of great abundance. It makes possible a cooperative society where everyone can benefit from the wealth produced. While there may be a thousand different ways of talking about this better world, it is clear that it can only be built if production is taken from private hands and organized to provide for the general welfare.

Education, housing and water

The history of U.S. economic development is a constant story of giant giveaways: dollars, land, roads, resources, military contracts, risk insurance and more – public wealth put into private hands. As the economy grew, it brought incredible wealth to a small class of people and a comfortable standard of living to millions of workers integral to the productive process.

Electronics changed all that. Today’s bailouts and the nationalization of failing industries – with the goal of getting them healthy and putting them back into private hands – are different from the giveaways of the past. They are a recognition that private ownership and the market no longer can meet society’s needs. Now millions of workers stand outside of the economic process. The connection of labor and capital in production is broken and the two classes therefore have to confront one another externally –politically. That reality shapes the path forward. The challenge of revolutionary work in the movement is to link the inability of capitalism to deliver and the need for a different system with what is the next step now for the movement.

As the world polarizes, the old route of pressure and protest for “more” won’t work anymore. In the fights for education, housing and water, we can see the first small steps on the only path open to the movement—toward a political confrontation between the two classes that face each other in society.

Education: When it established public schools a century ago, the government essentially took over the major cost of preparing laborers for an industrial society. Public schools provided personal benefit to students, but also occupied young people who would have otherwise destabilized the labor market, and freed parents for day work. As the capitalist economy no longer needed millions of laborers, even skilled ones, public schools came under attack. Growing cuts to public education and the recent boom in privatization are aimed at turning education funding into a profit center for business. The fight for public education today is a part of a broad political battle over whom the government will serve: will the government continue to serve the corporations that profit from the “business” of education, or will we take up a strategy to demand the federal government provide every child with an equal, quality education? Housing: The U.S. government entered the housing market to invigorate a prostrate economy in the 1930s. Home ownership stimulated the economy and tied a key section of the working class – those with jobs and income – into the system.

As jobs evaporate and electronics makes unheard-of financial speculation possible, the government pumps billions into the banks to maintain their profits, but turns its back on housing its people. Its focus is construction-industry profits, not families sleeping in shelters or in the cold.

When workers are being replaced by robots, housing can’t be tied to a job. The fight for housing can’t move forward without a strategy to force the government to stand up to the corporations and for American families.

Water: Following scientific advances in the late 1800s, the government undertook a huge effort to provide safe drinking water. Water for production and healthy workers benefitted the capitalist class as well.

After a century of allowing corporate pollution of water supplies, the government is now adding insult to injury by putting public water supplies into private hands. Private companies can cut off water (as public entities couldn’t). The private owners line their pockets by selling a necessity of life only to those who can pay. The demands of the water struggles in Detroit – to make all privatized water systems public and guarantee every household running water – put the responsibility where it should be, on the government to meet society’s needs.

Conclusion

If humanity is going to be fed, housed, and educated and preserve a livable planet, power must be in the hands of the class that will govern for the common good, not corporate profit. The struggle doesn’t need to be diverted onto a political path, because it is already objectively political.

For revolutionaries, this sense of direction is crucial. Our problems won’t be solved under this system, but we are preparing our class for the eventual resolution by helping guide it toward a political approach.

 

May.2010.Vol20.Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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