Open class struggle is now entering U.S. politics for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Both globally and nationally, the capitalist class is in uncharted waters and up against problems that exceed its capacity. They are flailing, they have no answers and they can no longer determine the debate.
The ruling class uses ideas to justify capitalism, and when reality reveals its incompetency and its horrors, these ideas no longer serve to delude and paralyze. Once the ideological ties to capitalism are broken, the working class can take the initiative to force government to meet its needs. Not for nothing did South African revolutionary Steve Biko say: “The greatest weapon in the hands of the enemy is your mind!”
The class struggle is the struggle between the capitalist class and the working class, in ways both open and hidden, both objective and subjective. Aggressive fascist policies are worsening the impact of skyrocketing rents, gig jobs, no jobs and intensifying climate disasters. Objectively, this growing equality of misery is forming people into a mighty social force. Subjectively, it is uniting from below around its common needs as an economic class, especially in the era of social media.
Revolutionaries rely on this developing practical unity to build conscious political unity and understanding. Historically, revolutions begin when the working class passes from scattered economic battles to unified political battles aimed directly against capitalists as a class and capitalism as a system.
Class turmoil in the Great Depression
Back in the 1930s, industrial capitalism rested on producing coal, mining iron, making steel and manufacturing industrial products with a working class that was primarily unskilled and not organized into unions. Fighting for its very survival, that class launched a practical and political offensive to organize into large-scale industrial unions. General strikes occurred in San Francisco and Minneapolis. Sit-down strikes occupied automobile plants.
Klan lynchings and the rising Make American Great Again movement (from where Trump took the name) attempted to split the industrial working class on the issue of white supremacy. But first in the mines, then across other industries, Communists, Socialists and other militants helped unions learn that admitting Black workers was the key to union expansion. Class turmoil lasted for most of the 1930s until President Franklin D. Roosevelt provided jobs through war production ahead of World War II.
Economic bribery undermined class thinking
After the war, the working class again seized the tactical initiative independently of capitalist control — a strike wave swept the country in 1946 and industrial unions began Operation Dixie to organize Southern textile workers. However, the rapidly rising living standards of many white workers allowed Klan violence to crush Operation Dixie and the ruling class to inject anti-communism to isolate independent union leaders.
From the mid-1950s to the 1960s, elements of the American working class again began to fight with independent politics in the form of a Civil Rights Movement, which then inspired the Women’s Movement and others to fight for social justice. Meanwhile, many allied with the global battle for national liberation against imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere which was rocking the capitalist system. Protests evolved from simply being against discrimination to being for social equality under the slogan of “Freedom Now!”
Capitalism then was still expanding and could afford concessions such as admitting broad sections of the working class into higher education as it bribed the skilled sector of labor with both economic and social privilege. Capitalists could preach that the American Dream was achievable without overturning the system. But that lie began to be exposed by 1999 as the latest digital technology allowed U.S. capitalism to shift manufacturing jobs to the global south within a global production system that established manufacturing in every major country.
The result was the step-by-step withdrawal of the economic bribe within the United States from high-paid jobs, government health care, schools, rent controls, etc. Government policy can easily be designed to help people, instead of feeding our taxes to uber-rich corporations and billionaires. But capitalism will not support people who it cannot exploit, so the ruling class today uses government as a tool for its investment and enrichment at the expense of the masses.
For the first time in 700 years, both capitalism and private property are on the strategic defensive, with no reforms that can address the crises and nothing to offer but fascism, war and destruction. As the material ties binding the people to capitalism erode, their subjective ties also shred. Now, only a class strategy can define the overall direction for the movement, one that will win the overall class war, not just its tactical battles. The working class can and must take the strategic offensive.
Developing class consciousness in the struggle for needs
A class strategic offensive goes beyond the defensive tactical battles over this or that attack by the government and its rulers. It is a broad battle that plays itself out in the political sphere, in the sphere of becoming conscious. This starts with concrete programmatic demands resting on the current struggle and real-life battles. Then, the working class must fight for the political power to guarantee them. Since the George Floyd Rebellion, working-class political power is increasingly on the agenda.
Having withdrawn the economic bribe, the ruling class is doubling down on the social bribe that white supremacy dangles to split the class and paralyze its initiative. Government scapegoating of immigrants seeks to misdirect the growing desperation for jobs paying wages that can provide for housing, health care and other basic needs. Yet, a fascist mass deportation campaign will not produce those kinds of incomes for citizens, which immigrants themselves lack.
The only path out of that trap is united struggle for what people need. For example, unions representing millions of workers, such as the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of Teachers, are aligning their contracts to expire on or about May 1, 2028 which could result in a massive general strike on International Workers Day, May 1, 2028. That will require developing widespread social consciousness about struggling for common needs, as a foundation for elevating thinking to the revolutionary level of class consciousness.
Humanity cannot survive as long as corporations are allowed to own the earth’s petroleum and energy as private property. Such resources can be transformed into public property managed for the benefit of all the people and of the planet. But why stop there? We can abolish police, abolish corporations and abolish private property. The path forward is through fighting to overcome the ideas that sustain those three things. Then the working class can really take the political initiative.
Published on November 21, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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