Program of LRNA
In this issue, Rally! is publishing the new program of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, adopted by delegates to its 11th Convention in June 2022. The LRNA Program describes the historic process of revolutionary change that is underway, and the political tasks facing revolutionaries. It is the organization’s foundational document, providing a general political guide for the work of all LRNA collectives and members.
“Our country and the world stand at a crossroads” begins the 2022 Program of the League. The technology that destroys the underpinnings of the capitalist system and causes the ruling class desperately to defend private property by imposing fascism, also offers humanity the potential for economic security and abundance. The revolutionary new class of displaced workers can provide for humanity’s immediate needs by attaining political power and organizing a society where the means for producing wealth and resources are owned in common.
The 2022 elections will establish conditions for the upcoming 2024 elections that will very likely determine how quickly America may descend into open fascist dictatorship, explains the article “Voting for Our Freedom.” This is not just about control of the House and the Senate, because many critical issues are determined at the state and local levels. Fascist forces are focusing most of their energy on local government, and fully 222 people who participated in the January 6 Capitol attack are either elected officials or currently running for office.
More Americans are challenging this rising threat to democratic rights. The majority of all young voters are dedicated to fighting for the life-and-death issues facing them as members of the working class: basic human needs, criminal justice and immigration reform, climate change, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights and, especially, student debt cancellation.
LRNA’s program notes that without a vision, the people perish. Last October, the organization hosted a conference of cultural workers on the theme “Revolutionary Vision: Toward a Cultural Offensive.” Culture and the war for consciousness shows that an actual war against the American people is at the same time a cultural war for their thinking. Cultural workers play key roles in this war through the words, images and other art they produce.
As Rally! board member and music critic Danny Alexander said at the conference: Our art emphasizes our basic needs, and our artists fight for our basic needs, for their own basic needs, too. But our art asks us to think bigger. Our art asks us what we need to be fully human, and our art thinks bigger than this system or any oppressive system. (A conference video is posted on LRNA’s website – lrna.org – and Vagabond Press anticipates publishing the presentations and performances in September.)
The article “What to the working class is the Fourth of July?”quotes one of the greatest speeches in American history, the sophisticated mingling of moral vision with practical political agitation by abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1852. He called slavery “a horrible reptile coiled up in your nation’s bosom,” that was tearing American society apart.
The figurative “coiled reptile” in America today is the creation of the propertyless and dispossessed section of the working class, which is increasingly living in squalor and being pushed out of the formal capitalist economy. It cannot survive without material means of support, which it cannot obtain without demanding distribution based on need. Thus, it stands at a crossroads, and is compelled to politically attack the private property system, a conflict every bit as irrepressible as the one in the pre-Civil War period.
We are now on the threshold of a new stage of robotic, digital, automated technology, says “Entering a new stage of history: The advent of AI.” Artificial intelligence, or AI, represents a new kind of robotics that is best described as machines that think autonomously and, in many respects, it leads to the elimination of human mental labor. One outcome of the new stage of AI is the ascendency of cryptocurrency, or virtual digital currency. It is private-sector speculative finance at a new stage.
Corporations such as Apple, Facebook (now Meta) and Google control and shape the use of AI in communications and social media. While the ruling class amasses virtual wealth, the rest of humanity is engaged in a race to the bottom. This demonstrates the absolute incompatibility of AI in the hands of private property and the ruling class. The new technology can help humans build a new future, a cooperative communist world. As LRNA’s new program proclaims, humanity is now in a race between revolution and annihilation.
July/August 2022 vol.32. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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