The historic aim of world society is the ending of private property and the creation of a cooperative communal society. Today this lies within humanity’s reach.

Qualitatively new means of production are laying the foundation for the abundance of society to be made available to all. A vast social revolution is underway. Destruction and polarization are tearing down the old and opening the way for the new. But the reign of private property and the class that defends it stands in the way. From the flux and instability of these changes is emerging the social force that can challenge not only the rule of the capitalist class, but can also put an end to the entire epoch of private property. Cast adrift as capitalism crumbles, uncoupled from all they know, they have no choice but to fight for their survival. The demands of this new impoverished class for food, housing, education, health care, and an opportunity to contribute to society are summed up as the demand for a co-operative society.

The new class must have political power to achieve these goals. To accomplish this, the class must move from its scattered economic struggles against the corporations to its united political struggles against the state.

The “path to power” of the class depends upon that class forming itself subjectively, that is, understanding itself as a class for itself, as it is formed objectively within the epochal leap underway. It must come to understand that its program alone can resolve humanity’s plight, and prepare itself politically, intellectually, and ideologically for the challenges it will face in its fight to assert its will in the battle for transformation.

Line of March

Understanding the line of march of the revolutionary process and mapping out what must be done in each stage to forge the path to class power is the historic role of the organization of revolutionaries. The line of march is the general progression of revolutionary development and transformation. The line of march shapes the map revolutionaries draft to achieve the goals of the revolution in each stage of development – the path to class power.
In its most general outline, the line of march of the revolutionary process is as follows. The introduction of qualitatively new means of production begins to invade and break up the existing productive relations. This economic revolution gives rise to social revolution, a process of destruction of the old order, and reconstruction of the new.

As polarization tears society apart, all connections are broken, setting loose social forces that had once been tied together, and opening the search for new forms of connection, new relations. Once polarization begins, revolutionaries do not attempt to hold it back, but work in such a way that they assist in breaking the process free of its confines, making transformation possible.
A social force capable of such a change must be outside capitalist
society and antagonistic to it. Electronics itself is creating this
force. As more and more production is taken over by electronics, the displaced workers are forced into lower and lower paying jobs and many of them end up in the growing mass of permanently unemployed. Today over a third of the work force are contingency, part-time, or temporary workers. A huge section works at or below minimum wage. They are not simply unemployed or poor, but a new class with few or no ties to capital.

The new class is revolutionary because it is increasingly outside of and hostile to the wages system. It is revolutionary because it cannot fight the individual employer – it must fight the state. It is revolutionary because robotics makes it impossible for them to co-exist with private property. The only way for this class to prevent the gigantic means of production from crushing them is to make them public property. But the class is scattered and ideologically divided, unprepared to assume its historic mission.

To take the next step forward, the breaking of the connection between the workers and the capitalists – already a reality in the objective economic sphere – must be mirrored in the ideological, and ultimately, the political sphere.

Dispossessed:
Decisive section of new class

Yet this class is counted in millions. Where to begin? What is the strategic section of this class? The one that can pull all others forward?

The greatest concentration of this section lies in the grand region of the industrial heartland, what is now termed the Rust Belt. It was once the greatest concentration of giant industry, the center of production that raised the US economy to a world power, and that boasted the greatest concentration of industrial workers in the world. Forced into competition with global labor, devastated by robotics, and forced from any possible means of finding work, this section has been separated from all that it has known and relied upon. This section is the dispossessed.

Yet it is not simply their vast numbers that makes them decisive. It is also their continuity in the communities of the region –generations in the plants, and in the unions – and their collective class experience of their battles for a better life raising up the living standards for all. It is their skills, their knowledge of organization, and the deep sense of their right to a future for themselves and their family. It is their ties, by a million different threads, to the same stratum of the class throughout the country. Regardless of color, they have been the bulwark of capitalist support for decades, and have little understanding of what is facing them, or how they can be used to further the capitalists’ agenda. Conscious of their class interests, and armed with a battle plan to achieve their immediate needs, they can be turned toward revolution, and can bring the rest of the class with them. This decisive section is already moving into activity, and the ruling class is already waging a fight for not simply their organizational leadership, but to shape their minds and vision of what’s possible. If this bid is left unchallenged, not only the workers of the Rust Belt, but all of society will fall prey to the fascist forces coalescing to restructure society around the fascist corporate state.

Scattered economic struggles
to united political struggles

Revolutionaries don’t fight just any battle. They fight along the line of march. The laws of capitalism make it inevitable that the means of production will reach a point where they can no longer be managed by private concerns alone. At a certain point, the partial recognition of the socialized character of the productive forces is forced upon the capitalists themselves. The bourgeoisie is forced to nationalize in its efforts to protect the capitalist system, while at the same time it must lay the foundation for a new social order based on private property without capitalism. They too, like all ruling classes before them, must remold themselves to the emerging economy. They are fighting over how to accomplish the magnitude of all the tasks before them, but they cannot escape that these tasks must be done. For the developing new class, the only way to prevent being crushed is to force the government to take over the full range of services and make them public property in the interests of the people. This means nationalizing health care and education, and making these massive means of production public property.

Nationalization alone is not the goal, but it 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. In the battle to form the class “for itself,” the battle over nationalization moves the workers from their scattered economic struggles against the corporations to united political struggles against the state. In the struggle to transfer capitalist property in order to feed, clothe, house, and care for itself, the class moves from simply confronting elements of the state to recognizing the state as an arm of the capitalist class. In the fight for its demands, the class will come to realize it cannot achieve those demands within the capitalist system, and that it must battle and defeat a state that interferes with the circulation of the necessities of life.

Fight for political direction

In the midst of the great battles of the nineteenth century between the capitalists and the working class, Karl Marx reminded the workers that the battles they fought and had yet to fight had significance far beyond changing their immediate conditions. These battles were necessary, “not only in order to change existing conditions,” he told the workers, “but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power.” History creates the objective conditions as does new machinery, conquest, and revolution. But the subjective response to the conditions depends entirely upon the thinking of the people. If they do not respond correctly, the cause is lost.
The strategy of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America is to politicize the masses, and to supply the emerging revolutionaries who are fighting around the practical demands of the class with the political propaganda and education that will round out their fight. Tens of thousands of socially conscious people declare themselves revolutionaries in opposition to the degenerating social and economic conditions. The League’s mission is to unite these scattered revolutionaries on the basis of the demands of the new class, and to educate and win them over to the cooperative communist solution of the problem.

In spite of worsening economic conditions, nothing can be accomplished until the American people hold a vision of where they want to go and what they want to be. Creating and imbuing them with such vision is the overriding task of revolutionaries and the foundation of our organization.

 

May.2010.Vol20.Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
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