The ruling class in the United States has accelerated its assault on the working class, especially the most dispossessed and marginalized of that class. As they force more and more people to struggle for basic needs, the rulers undercut whatever support they have had among workers. Force and violence replace bribery and privilege as the rulers confront an upsurge of workers’ discontent.
The essence of fascism today — its drive and purpose — is specific to this epoch. In the past, the laws inherent in capitalism could guarantee wealth and power. Now the pursuit of wealth depends on changes in the law and political enforcements. Nothing can escape the enforcing arm of the State protecting investors’ access to anything that might enrich them. Fascism today stands on the inequalities of the past epoch to defend private property itself.
The ruling class is reorganizing the government to attempt to protect their interests by merging the State, and all its financial, political, and military power, with the corporations. This reorganization openly represents the interests of the national and global capitalists, not the people of the country. Many recognize that the U.S. government is developing into a fully fascist apparatus. This awareness forces the rulers to dispense with the elements of bourgeois democracy by which they have been able to control the population.
The legal advance of fascism has attacked the framework of bourgeois democracy. By the spring of 2021, more than 360 bills had come before state legislatures to limit, suppress or overthrow the right to vote. In the past decades we have seen a judiciary heavily infiltrated by a legal cadre organized in the fascist-minded Federalist Society. The rulers have launched legislative and court campaigns around reproductive rights, school vouchers, against vaccinations and public health, and for “states’ rights,” all of which are intended as code to divide and continue to conquer along racial, gender, and any lines they can.
When legal means are insufficient to guarantee their aims to protect private property, the ruling class resorts to extra-legal means. The attempted coup of January 6, 2021 and the violence and visibility of white supremacist groups (including their infiltration of police and sheriff departments across the country and the armed forces) over the last few years have given us a taste of these extra-legal means.
Approaching Social Consciousness
In response, the convergence of crises today has unleashed a torrent of new social organizations that are raising programmatic demands in place of the defensive, incremental campaigns of the past. These demands are also visionary, like defunding and abolishing the police, social housing, canceling student debt, and rebuilding human communities in balance with nature and the rights of all peoples.
The common condition and common interests of low-income and displaced workers, rooted in their fight for the basic necessities, are undermining the old ideologies used to divide the class. The record turnout in the November 2020 elections and the decisive rejection of the fascist dictatorship openly advocated by the Trump campaign demonstrated that elections are now an indispensable arena for class battle.
The Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020, electoral victories by the “Squad” in Congress, and victories in state and local elections inspired independent political activity, like the movements around the Green New Deal, the Ilhan Omar bill to cancel rents, and various bills to create Medicare for All and social housing. Independent voices in Congress reflected the growing unity of the movement and became vehicles for deepening and broadening it.
The ruling class is not giving up without a fight. Their campaign against voting rights and so- called “Critical Race Theory” is an attempt to undo all the gains of the 2020 rebellion and divert and block the emerging unity of the displaced workers. In spite of this, a growing number are becoming more socially conscious. With social consciousness, these workers come to understand that they are members of a class and that they need class solidarity. They become aware that there is a ruling class, and that it has class interests contrary to their own.
The intersection of street rebellions and elections make them schools for social consciousness. They create the opportunity to talk about the need for class power to take government out of the hands of the corporations and put it into the hands of we, the people.
Workers are at different levels in their understanding. Where some are ready to revolt, others still feel the system can be reformed. Again, it will take patiently working toward a common understanding and action, including creation of a third party.
The technological revolution is splitting and destroying Democrats, Republicans, and virtually every other political organization today. Part of participating in elections means assessing this polarization and the possible development of a third party. Third parties will not simply be one or another of the individual third-party formations in existence today but will reflect the broad social motion as it develops.
The development of a third party will accelerate the political polarization in society and the political formation of the displaced class. It is part of the process of the scattered economic struggles becoming united political struggles against the government. It is a necessary and inevitable step toward a workers’ party and the social consciousness that a workers’ party would represent.
Government must serve the people’s needs
As capitalism collapses, the economy becomes increasingly nationalized in the course of the inevitable bailouts. This prepares the ground for the eventual battle to be concentrated against the government rather than directed at thousands of scattered capitalists. People are forced to demand government action to meet their needs. This raises the issue of which class the government serves and becomes a battlefield where social consciousness can be learned. In the long run, workers cannot secure either their basic needs or real democracy without transferring the means of production from private property to public ownership. Electoral politics that do not ultimately address the abolition of corporate private property cannot ultimately secure the necessities the workers need to survive.
In the 18th century, few could envision the abolition of the slavery on the plantations of the western hemisphere. But at a certain point, the abolition of slavery became possible and necessary. That private property relation was overthrown. And we can see, in the future, how the abolition of all relations of private property is possible and necessary.
The urgencies of today call for a broad unity of the movement for the life-or-death needs of the people and nature.
Through words or deeds, vast numbers of active and socially conscious people declare themselves revolutionaries. The League of Revolutionaries for a New America aims to grow, not for any sectarian interests as an organization, but as a place where revolutionaries from all walks of life, experiences, and fronts of struggle can maximize individual and collective energies to politically equip the most revolutionary class for its historic role.
We invite all revolutionaries to join us. rally@lrna.org
November/December 2022 vol.32. Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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