A Statement by the League National Council
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many, they are few!
– Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819
In this election season, we the people are being betrayed by a ruling class determined to keep the American people divided and powerless. Our corporate rulers use fascist tactics that are elements in the Heritage Foundation playbook called “Project 2025.” The prelude to Project 2025 includes the recent US Supreme Court decisions legitimizing the attempted coup on January 6, encouraging criminalization of unhoused people, and taking away our rights to safe food, water, and air — and much more.
Project 2025 (and its companion policies put forward in Trump campaign speeches and in Supreme Court decisions) is the open replacement of even the limited US democracy with unrestricted, violent corporate dictatorship. The Insurrection Act invoked against peaceful protests. Presidential immunity. The reversal of efforts to ensure basic civil rights and protection from discrimination. Internments and/or deportations of tens of millions. Block-by-block military sweeps in neighborhoods of color to round up anyone without a government ID. Restoration of Jim Crow injustice. A national abortion ban. Suppression of independent newspapers and other independent media. Increase of mass incarceration. Denial of housing and health care subsidies. Deportation of Palestinian protesters. Suppression of LGBTQ communities. Elimination of environmental regulations. Destruction of all federal regulatory agencies. Doing away with the Dept. of Education. Fixing and/or overturning of elections (where they still exist). Stripping citizenship from children of immigrants. Imprisonment of revolutionaries.
This is the promise, the nightmare of Project 2025. It represents the most immediate and dangerous tendency in the overall fascist offensive, and must be defeated. As the famous anti-fascist Georgi Dimitrov taught us, whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the corporate ruling class and the growth of fascism in its preparatory stages, will not be in a position to prevent its victory later.
Revolutionary tactics are meaningless unless they are part of revolutionary strategy. The League’s long-term strategy is to strive continually for working class political unity, political organization, political independence, and political consciousness. This is the only path to the power necessary to organize the cooperative society that modern digital technology demands. Project 2025 is deliberately aimed at preventing that working class unity through denial of basic human rights, terror, and bloodshed. Defeating it is indispensable to advancing the revolutionary process.
People dare not let themselves be deceived by the illusion that Project 2025 is not so bad, or not so different from the status quo. Project 2025 actually corresponds well to the classic definition of fascism – “substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie – bourgeois democracy – by another form – open terrorist dictatorship.”
Defeating Project 2025 is therefore not about supporting Biden or any other candidates. It’s a tactic for building the revolutionary movement. It is about step by step working for the unity of the various sectors of our movement, beginning especially where the economy throws workers together in a growing equality of poverty. It is about bringing together the people fighting for basic needs that Project 2025 will keep them from attaining. Revolutionaries need to think politically about how to connect and engage with people who are feeling the pain and seeking ways to address it.
Electoral campaigns – local, state, and national – can play a powerful role in building political unity. While we cannot defeat Project 2025 by simply working in an electoral campaign, tactical voting can be an important part of it. Building unity means patiently educating each other, and refraining from shaming others based on how they cast their ballots.
Real victory today therefore requires defeating dictatorship and guaranteeing social-economic transformation in the interests of the working class, not simply in the interests of corporate private property. The working class has to have democracy to fight for the programs it needs to survive. In the long run, we can have neither real democracy nor economic security until our social movement organizes the political power to replace the private property economy with one that distributes society’s wealth based on human needs, not private profit.
In spite of the bloodshed, in spite of the enormous obstacles, and even if we fail to stop the advance of Project 2025 this time around, we have no choice but to hold on to our vision. The same technology that the ruling class uses to throw people out of work can also be used to set people free. By impoverishing millions, the system is creating a class of people that Plato called “in love with revolution.”
The only way for our class to defeat Project 2025 and the fascism it represents is to fight for/a society where wealth is owned publicly and distributed according to need. Victory cannot be won until we gain the political power necessary to defeat fascism, organize the cooperative society we need, and create the peaceful and sustainable world that in our hearts and minds we know is possible.
Published on July 24, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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