Six hundred sixty-six U.S. billionaires have gained over $1 trillion in wealth during the pandemic. These billionaires could pay for all of the relief for working families included in the proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Herein lies the reason capitalists are so anti-communist.
What defines capitalism is that workers sell their labor power, which is becoming much more difficult as robotics becomes the norm in all aspects of the production of goods. No job, no wages, no money. What defines communism is that society is organized around a person’s ability to take from society what they need and give to society what they are able. Capitalism is based on the exploitation of labor. Communism is based upon cooperation. And let’s face it. There is no lack of food, housing, clothing, culture, health care, and education to be distributed.
To contain the growing unrest resulting from the accelerating production of goods without labor, the U.S. government is stepping in to manage the economy to serve corporate interests and use brute force against the American people. This merging of the government with the corporations is fascism.
In this issue of Rally, Comrades!, we look at how we go forward to fight for a society that can meet the needs of us all and address the obstacles we face.
We recognize the role women are playing in coping with the pandemic, as they labor in health care facilities, grocery stores, nursing homes, schools, transportation, restaurants, and retail stores. These women are at the forefront of the revolutionary struggle demanding that the government take care of our basic needs and eliminate the rise of police brutality. “Women in the Revolutionary Struggle for Basic Needs” concludes that the actual program represented by these struggles is to abolish private property and adopt the cooperative, communist program in the interest of the whole of society.
“Victory in Georgia in the War for America” talks about the significance of the Georgia election. The capitalist system is imploding economically and politically. The austerity, the disruption, the destruction of society – the transition to fascist abandonment of the people – is deeper, faster, and wider than ever before. All the institutions that were built on the need for a healthy working population are being broken down. The election of Warnock and Ossoff in Georgia brought Democratic Party control of the Senate for the first time in ten years. This opens the door to a struggle over who government is supposed to serve.
Our planet is under enormous stress from the ravages of human activity. As analyzed in “Human Health Depends on Environmental Health,” capitalism and private property are the biggest barriers to solving these enormous problems. The growth imperative and profit motive stand squarely in the way of the widespread sustainability measures, needed to slow or stop ecological destruction. This will take a major transformation from a capitalist to a cooperative society, which our youth understand. In a recent poll, 49 percent of generation Z (ages 16-23) view socialism favorably. Sixty percent of Millennials (age 24-39) support a “complete change of our economic system away from capitalism,” and 57 percent of Gen Z does as well. These are significant increases from just last year.
There is an underlying fear that the development of the COVID-19 vaccines has been rushed. The opinion of some doctors and others that the vaccines were too rapidly developed reflects a conscious effort to obscure how science works and interacts with society. While the distrust of the COVID-19 vaccine in communities of color is rooted in their historical and current mistreatment by the medical establishment, there are also other reasons for the rejection of COVID-19 vaccines and the associated science. Turn to our article “COVID-19 Vaccines and the Attack on Basic Science” to read more.
“Globalization and its Discontents” points out that globalization is an objective process, a world-historical stage, from which there is no going back. The internal contradictions and the struggles of a ruling class bent on finding its way through the crisis based on anti-globalist or populist-nationalist projections cannot ultimately be successful. But all that is part of the fight being made over how to operate in a new, multi-polar world. The only solution for a global ruling class is to move toward establishing a fascist world order. For a rising global new class of workers, the only solution is to move toward the reorganization of world society in the interest of their class and for all of humanity.
The ruling class is determined to maintain its position of wealth, power, and privilege to the detriment of most of the people across the globe. The U.S. ruling class is transforming the U.S. State from bourgeois democracy to outright fascism. It is up to working class revolutionaries to fight for the transformation that will end want forever. RC
March/April 2021 Vol31. Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades
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