After nine months of a pandemic that saw more than 70 million Americans go without work, and after mass unrest over the police murder of George Floyd, 2021 began as a year that promised change. Although a new president took office, worldwide distribution of newly produced vaccines was uneven, almost nonexistent, and a deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus was sweeping the United States by late summer and early fall. From the ending of eviction moratoriums to the brutal treatment of Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, it was hard to see much change for the better in 2021. In fact, the year might be summed up as a time of bitter disappointment.
In retrospect, the inability to move forward makes sense. The 2020 election revealed a deeply divided working class with a third of it voting for Biden, a third voting for Trump and a third not voting at all. Like all the problems we face, the partisan election split continued into 2021 with a special election in Georgia on January 5 and a raid on the Capitol the next day. After four years of Trump’s divisive agitation, the dog-whistle appeal of Biden’s presidency was a return to some measure of political “normalcy.” Of course, we know such normalcy means little in a world where a collapsing capitalist system is no longer providing for its workers while threatening the destruction of the Earth. The working class has no choice but to continue to fight.
We have been doing just that. In April, an Alabama Amazon worker fight to build a union met defeat, but support from various unions suggests a new vote may be coming. Meanwhile, thousands of other Amazon workers on New York’s Staten Island have petitioned to build a union. Hollywood prevented an October strike by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, but Hollywood labor’s dissatisfaction continues and future actions are being planned. Thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers went on strike in November. In October, The Washington Post reported that workers struck 178 employers this year. Millions of American workers have quit their jobs, a dramatic trend dubbed “the great resignation” by the news media.
Meanwhile, workers fought for eviction moratoriums and housing for all. Our class halted the Keystone XL pipeline in June and in the autumn began to fight the Biden-supported Oil Sands pipeline’s production. Noting the thousand people, including 230 African Americans, killed by police in the intervening year, workers organized for police reform in Minneapolis, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and elsewhere on the first anniversary of George Floyd’s death, which also was publicly commemorated in Germany, Greece and Spain.
And it is important to recognize this global dimension. The unrest in America reflected unrest around the world. In July, Foreign Policy columnist Elise Labott wrote: “To call 2021 the summer of discontent would be a severe understatement.” The article referred to worker unrest in Colombia, Cuba, Ethiopia, Haiti, South Africa and at least 37 other countries due to malnourishment, supply-chain breakdowns, lack of vaccines, climate change and rising prices for necessities. Labott pointed out that this global disruption made its greatest leap in the United States “because COVID-19 exposed America’s fault lines.”
The United States was founded by capitalists who propagandized that business competition guaranteed political freedom, an idea that made some sense at the start of the industrial era when what people saw was the potential to break from the Old-World system of monarchy. But even in 1776, the “Father of Capitalism” Adam Smith warned that the workers must organize because the ruling class would always be organizing “to lower the price of work,” in other words, to lower the wages they pay workers to the absolute minimum.
The entire history of working-class struggle has revolved around this conflict, but we saw vividly how little the ruling class cares about American workers when the pandemic hit. The U.S. government developed private-public partnerships to guarantee that America’s billionaires get 62 percent richer from the pandemic, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. To get his infrastructure and other bills passed, Biden slashed trillions of dollars in aid to appease the ruling class which runs both parties. Meanwhile, America’s and the world’s workers face inflation rates for basic necessities rising faster than they have in 30 years.
Today, everyone can see that the system is broken. To provide for one another, workers everywhere are already working around and outside of the system. However, if we consider the global causes of the system’s breakdown, we can also see global causes for hope. If we grasp that automation has eliminated the value of a worker’s labor from the equation that once suggested capitalism could liberate us, then we grasp that the system cannot be fixed. Our liberation begins with a letting go of the past.
Our ruling class deeply understands the Machiavellian idea of divide and conquer, and it wants to keep us divided as we have been divided in the past. Since an increasingly automated economy will provide for less and less of the population as it grows more efficient, the ruling class wants us to cling to the past for our answers. It controls its two political parties and guarantees that we are offered different versions of our varied pasts to keep us divided. The ruling class uses conservatism to assure a fraction of the voters that it need not change and that the key to the future is either abundant caution or a return to a frontier mentality that upholds ideas like individualism and competition over social concerns. The ruling class uses liberalism to appeal to the desire for change in a way that can be controlled. It repeatedly compares Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and, in this way, they can appeal to virtually all the workers who do not see themselves in conservative America but hope to see a way forward. The ruling class knows the American worker is smart and discontented, so it offers a variety of frameworks that strive to keep us from seeing what we really are, a great class of people who are being systematically cheated, attacked and abandoned by our leaders.
But if we truly grasp the potential of our exponentially developing digital technologies, we can see that we have an ability to win the war against ruling-class control which was inconceivable in the past. Freed from the dictatorship of the private-property system, a wealth accumulation machine that keeps the rich in constant competition with each other at the cost of the planet itself, we could use our technologies to provide for everyone on the planet efficiently and sustainably. This smart use of our technology for something other than profits would allow us to stop the destruction of the world’s environment, leaving a healthier planet for the generations that follow us. With the people in charge of the technology, we could isolate new diseases the moment they surface, offering all the world’s people the best health care imaginable.
We have the technological ability to build this new world right now. What we do not have is a working class united by a vision beyond the boundaries of capitalism. Whether people call themselves liberals, conservatives, or progressives, what the working class shared in 2021 was a sense of disillusionment. If we could replace those failed illusions with a real world understanding of the conditions we face, we would see our need for one another despite individual differences about old ideas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given us a deadline of 2030 to avoid “climate catastrophe.” Now, whether that is precisely true or not, it makes plain the urgent necessity of the class not driven by wealth and profits to wrest control from the ruling class and take charge. To do so, we need to build unity among the workers in our class. Here’s to 2022 as the year we gain the class consciousness necessary to give us a fighting chance. RC
January/February 2022. Vol32.Ed1
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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