Eighty-five of the world’s richest billionaires possess more wealth (over one trillion dollars) than 3.5 billion of the planet’s poorest population, according to the January 2014 report by Oxfam International, “Working for the Few.” As a consequence, over one billion people suffer from chronic malnutrition, and 30 million die of malnutrition every year, 100,000 every day, according to Global Policy Forum, cited in “Only a Cooperative Society Can End Hunger,” in this issue of Rally, Comrades! The developing polarization of wealth and poverty which has reached a level unequaled in all of human history is rooted in the fundamental antagonism at the base of society: the new technology has created productive forces that can produce unparalleled abundance while the economic system based in private property stands in the way of distribution according to need.
Revolutionaries today must understand the world in which we live, but as “Understand the World, Make History” points out, we understand the world in order to change it. We live in the time of the “leap,” a kind of transition period in which the laws of motion that governed the development of the old society are dying away, and a new law system is emerging, wherein we see a new social force developing, a new class that cannot survive with private property. Distribution according to need becomes the practical solution to the real problems facing this new class. A communal, cooperative communist solution is a new world without private property.
“Vision of a New World” shows how as private property has gone through its various forms of development, its latest version, capitalist private property, has reached its end. We don’t have to fight the battle to end capitalism. Our point of attack must be to abolish private property, because the ruling class, while they have no choice but to let capitalism go, will defend private property at all costs. With a new tyranny of corporations, the ruling class has moved to take over the State in order to impose their will and maintain their rule by brute force.
“Detroit: One Year a Slave” provides a concrete and graphic example of just how the tyranny of private property is being imposed in America today. The Emergency Manager Act has deprived many cities in Michigan, including Detroit, of any semblance of democratic government, and the current bankruptcy proceedings are moving to privatize, sell off assets, and gut worker’s pension funds. The article aptly puts it: what is happening in Detroit is not unlike the Dred Scott decision made by the Supreme Court in 1857. It said at that time that African Americans in the United States had no legal rights whatsoever that any white man was bound to respect. The situation in Detroit today serves notice that in America the working class has no rights that the ruling class is bound to respect.
A new social force is arising to confront this fascist offensive of the ruling class. “International Women’s Day: Women’s Revolutionary Role” celebrates the contribution that women have made in the revolutionary process, and particularly their position in society today and the leading role they are taking. Women are in the fight, whether it is against foreclosures, for education for their children or opposing the police state; their emancipation is bound up with the emancipation of the new class as a whole.
This new class, this new social force, at the very beginning stages of its political development, is fighting for its very life. The main obstacle that stands in the way of humanity’s advance is private property. It must be abolished; the only solution for this class is distribution according to need, a cooperative, communist solution.
This is the way forward. As our cover article “A World to Win” proposes, the fundamental responsibility of revolutionaries today is to connect the fight for the necessities of life with the strategic goal of the overthrow of private property.
March.April Vol24.Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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