Our country is entering a volatile and difficult phase of its social and political life. People across the vast spectrum that makes up this country are being forced into economic distress they had not envisioned for themselves and their families. Political debate and discussion are polarizing — but not necessarily along clear class and political lines.
The current moment is one of a cyclical crisis of overproduction within an ongoing economic revolution and the first stages of the fight for program within an emerging social struggle. This moment poses to revolutionaries critical questions of direction and adds urgency to our tasks.

The situation we face

Even before the financial crash of 2008, decades of labor-replacing technology, downsizing, and outsourcing had already permanently displaced millions of workers and cost millions of middle-income jobs and generous benefits. By the mid-1990s, for example, approximately one half of all manufacturing workers were temporary or contingent workers.

The loss of jobs and benefits is easily measured — and painfully suffered by millions of Americans. Among the world’s 21 most “economically developed” countries, the U.S. has the third highest rate of poverty. Only Mexico and Turkey have higher rates. The average math test scores of U.S. school children rank 16th among these 21. The American Society of Civil Engineers notes, “broken water mains, gridlocked streets, crumbling dams and levees… from failing infrastructure have a negative impact on the checkbook and on the quality of life of each and every American.”

More difficult to measure, but just as devastating, is the effect of the economic revolution on how the basics that society needs — such as education, health, utilities, transportation — are distributed to society. Services and social infrastructure used to be public, because society needed them for its development and capital needed them in order to get able-bodied workers to the factories. The distribution of these goods and services is now being privatized, because the corporations need to make profit off of every facet of life.

The crash and economic crisis express an intense moment in the economic revolution that introduced labor-replacing technology into production and diminished the value of all commodities, including labor power.

At the same time, the crash and economic crisis express a typical cyclical crisis of overproduction. This includes the over-extension of credit to stimulate the purchase of surplus homes and other real estate and the over-inflation of their prices through the issuance of risky high interest loans. Lenders got the government to relax the rules on lending, thus allowing the banks to make loans that could not be repaid. What started out as a crisis of over-production of housing and a mortgage lending crisis rapidly spread throughout the world economy.

Capitalism has always had recurring crises of overproduction. It is caused by the overwhelming contradiction that the capitalists are constantly expanding production of commodities under conditions of limited demand because of the lack of purchasing power on the part of the working class and other sectors. These crises always appear in the form of an overproduction of commodities, huge inventories of unsold goods, a sharp fall in prices, curtailment of production, skyrocketing unemployment, lowered wages and benefits, breakdown of credit, stock market crashes, and ruined lives. The net result of this crisis has been the loss of jobs, thus exacerbating and prolonging the crisis because there is no means for people who are unemployed to buy the over-produced commodities.

As cyclical crises continue, the capitalists take advantage of the low prices by raising labor productivity through the renewal of their plant and equipment. This creates a demand for new means of production and the market revives and a new boom cycle begins. This boom-to-bust cycle is repeated every ten or twenty years, thus the term cyclical crisis. The Great Depression of the 1930s occurred during the industrial era and started with a stock market crash and spread into industry. However this current crisis is occurring under different conditions – on top of an ongoing economic revolution – and as the United States is losing its economic power on the world stage. The recovery might be short and not very deep; it will potentially lay the groundwork for a much deeper crisis to follow in the near future.

Current political moment

In September 2008, the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve Bank, and private financial corporations worked as one to save the global system of exchange. The bailout redistributed trillions of dollars from the public to private interests in the financial industry. But it was more than a bailout. Punctuating the ongoing merger of the government and the corporations in the interests of private property, it was a step in the development of fascism, the reorganization of the state to protect private property under new conditions. The government’s 2009 bankruptcy reorganization of GM and Chrysler wiped out jobs for thousands of workers and benefits for hundreds of thousands more.
The government had to intervene. The movement of people for what they need now confronts a political obstacle. The polarity between the government and corporations on the one hand and the widening movement of people for the necessaries of life is shifting to predominance.

In response to the economic revolution, scattered struggles are spreading. These are struggles over how to solve the problems of society – problems of the environment, utilities, health, education, housing, for example. They are not necessarily explicitly “workers’ struggles.” Nor are they a struggle for political power.

The financial crash and bailout unleashed economic fear and popular rage against the banks and the government. Diverse players clothe themselves in populism in order to agitate a mass base for any number of political objectives — for the fascist reorganization of the state already in progress, for class programs, or just to get re-elected.

Government action to protect the system of exchange is igniting scattered discourse over whose interests the government protects.

Stages of revolutionary struggle

The line of march of the proletarian movement is the stages of development that the movement has to go through – from scattered economic struggles for every day needs, through stages and phases, to the struggle for the political power to reorganize society in its own interests, and the abolition of private property.

At its essential heart, history is made by the struggle among classes over who will have the political power to construct society in its interests. But knowing this truth does not make it possible to skip the necessary stages along the way to the political power to accomplish that social transformation. Just because we can identify the next step in the development of the proletarian movement, that does not mean that next indispensable step is the next thing that will happen.

The political formation of the class is a complex, multi-dimensional process. On the objective level, the social response has to reach a point of intensity in which the social effects of the economic revolution draw all sections of society into motion, contention, and implosion.   In this sense, we can anticipate a period of social struggle when all of society is forced into struggle against the effects of the economic revolution, but is not yet shaped by a clear or predominant ideology or direction.

On the more or less subjective level, the social response has to go through a stage of mass struggle. The history of the U.S. is not the same as that of Europe, where the term “mass struggle” originated and referred to the presence of various classes within the general “toiling masses.” But the term is useful here to refer to the process out of which eventually emerges — or erupts — the predominance of understanding of common interests. For example, the social response reaches a certain level of understanding that the corporations are jerking us around, that the government has to serve the public, not the corporations. Of course there is no guarantee that mass struggle will take shape along such clear lines. But there is bound to coalesce some anger on the part of the masses of people against the obscenely richest one percent of the population and the power they hold over the rest of us – some sense of “us vs them” – but it is too soon to say how this will take shape.
In the real world, the proletarian movement, social struggle, and mass struggle are not separate categories or sets of struggles. But understanding them as abstractions equips us to assess trends as they are emerging.

Perhaps the clearest example of the organic relation of social struggle and mass struggle in U.S. history is the struggle of the African American people for freedom and equality. This struggle went on for over 100 years, at most stages under bourgeois leadership. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, all sections of the African-American population were in motion. This broad social struggle shaped the social discourse of the time and drew other sections of society into motion.

Then in 1965, in Watts, California, the proletarian element among the African American population asserted itself as the driving force of that social struggle and aimed its fire against the state. The proletarian demands rose to predominance. The wrath of the movement was aimed at the state; the people held the streets for nearly a week. What was once a social struggle without a political target now took a dramatically political course. In response, of course, every arm of bourgeois rule was wielded to put the bourgeois forces back in control of the broader movement. The Watts Rebellion had unleashed mass struggle and set the pace for every battle at that time.

Struggle emerging today

Government action — and its perceived state of dysfunction — is shaping the environment in which a modern-day Watts can usher in real mass struggle. The emergent expressions of mass struggle today will have a different foundation. The Civil Rights Movement and Watts Rebellion expressed the expansion of the system; today we are seeing the stages of its objective destruction.

And mass struggle will take a different form. Fascist agitation appeals to the fear and anger in the wake of the financial collapse and bailout and paves the way for the fascist reorganization of society that is already underway. At the same time, social problems cannot be solved so long as the government serves the corporations, not the public.

The driving force of mass struggle today is also bound to be different. The dispossessed have the skills and occupy the place in society that make it possible for them to play that role as a driving force. But direction is not guaranteed. On the one hand, the political direction of this section is up for grabs — and are the target of some powerful, dangerous, and disorienting agitation. On the other hand, the overwhelming character of their demands is proletarian. While some among these dispossessed still have the hope and possibility of getting a decent job in a slight economic upturn, or starting some little business in the crevices of an economy in crisis, most will have to cast their lot with those masses of workers being expelled permanently from the productive economy.

With its appeals to the "middle class" and for "small government," most of the current populist agitation has a murky but strong class kernel and programmatic edge. Although the lines are not clearly drawn at this point, the current rumblings express the preliminary agitation for and contention among different class programs. In the meantime, with its dangerous manipulation of fear and confusion, the ruling class practices the art of politics and relies on the spontaneous movement to accomplish its political objectives.

Although it is still relatively early in the process, across the political and ideological spectrum, more are drawn into activity. On the one hand, for example, the Tea Party movement expresses how the economic crisis and bailout is radicalizing new sections of the population and propelling them into political activity. Fascistic agitation appeals to the ideological roots of the country, particularly the anti-government and individualist strains.

On the other hand, thousands in California have taken to the streets to protect the right to public education. From elementary school children to college professors and administrators — all strata are involved. The governor tries to deflect the anger from the state legislature, but the struggle expands.
In neither case is the ideology cohesive. The vast and diverse awakening gives a sense of both the social and mass struggle in the offing. Further deterioration of the economy will draw more sections of society into social struggle. Contention over class interests will manifest itself in mass struggle. Ultimately, out of the turmoil will come a polarization of class interests and programs.

Revolutionaries will be able to seize the potential of the objective character of the current revolutionary process. Like in no other revolution we have seen before in history, the character of the developing revolution is proletarian. Similarly, there has never been an antagonism between labor-replacing technology and a social system in which profit depends on the employment of labor, the expulsion of sections of the U.S. work force from productive life and employment, the cheapening of the labor that is still employed, nor the formation of a class that is objectively communist. The new class can accomplish its political development within the broader process of society beginning to fight out the resolution of the social effects of the economic revolution.

Nor is the polarization likely to be fought to an ideological conclusion within the current political party system and the grip it holds on the thinking of the populace. The developing polarization within and perceived ineffectiveness of the Democratic and Republican parties are setting the stage for the breaks in the continuity of the current political party system.   Whether and when the polarization is expressed in the formation of a centrist party, a "social democratic" party or a fascist party or some combination, some sort of political party realignment would set the conditions to accelerate the political polarization and political formation of the class.

Social struggle is a necessary phase from which can emerge a mass struggle with some broad, general understanding of “the 99% vs the 1%” or “us vs them.” Although we cannot predict any timetable for such a process, each stage of the revolutionary struggle has the potential to go faster than the last. 

The actual resolution to each social calamity — from education to the environment — is the abolition of private property. The program of the new class can emerge within the phases of mass struggle — as the actual resolution to concrete problems. 
Our country is headed for a period of struggle that is difficult to imagine after almost 40 years of calm. There will be breaks in continuity, moments at which revolutionaries will have the opportunity to influence more broadly and profoundly than in the past. With an understanding of the stages and phases of the revolutionary struggle, we can better focus our work and accomplish our mission.

Political Report of the Standing Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, March 2010

July.2010.Vol20.Ed4
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