In a New Year’s resolution, “a person resolves to change an undesired trait or behavior, to accomplish a personal goal, or otherwise improve their life.” With the various Migrant Caravans, thousands of Central Americans collectively resolved to improve their lives by trekking to the United States. They organized themselves through general assemblies, giving each participant a political voice, something their governments have long denied them. Meanwhile, France’s Yellow Vest movement tapped into this discontent and mobilized thousands of different political affiliations, to protest growing poverty and government proposed new taxes on gasoline and pensions that would make their situation even worse. By New Year’s Day, president Macron was forced to back down, and to raise the minimum wage.
The American working class, like rest of the working class around the world, is fighting back against ruling class efforts to make them carry the burden of the capitalist crisis. “Where We Stand After the Elections,” shows that while the high voter turnout in the 2018 mid-term election appeared inspired by anti-Trump resistance, the actual demands were for the government to do something about poverty and hardship, and to guarantee access to housing, health care, clean water, and public education. The people are forced into participating in politics to fight for their future, including the electoral arena, because they have nowhere else to turn.
This issue of Rally, Comrades! explains why the growth of these movements, as the new year began, signals that something is ending, and something new is beginning. With the electronics revolution, the capitalist system that private property created is dying, and those who accumulated wealth under that system are desperately fighting to hang onto power while the society around them collapses.
The article, “Race and Class in a Time of Epochal Change,” explain that the masses of Black workers suffer profoundly and disproportionately from the economic crisis and cannot move forward, without fundamental changes in the entire social and economic system. The ruling class offensive against Black workers is central to its fight to impose fascism on society as a whole, which means that the mass of African Americans workers and the growing mass of impoverished white workers have common class interests. Revolutionaries concentrate on the unity of the historically disparate sectors of the new, revolutionary class.
The holiday season reminded us how generous and caring the American people can be. But that homeless person on the side of the road also exposes the shocking immorality of a system that produces both abundance and growing deprivation. Charity alone will never solve the problem. “From the Editors: A Practical Solution to Homelessness,” concludes that it comes down to a question of property: the immorality of a system where property rights are absolute, and those who lack money must go without basic necessities, versus the morality of a cooperative, sharing system, in which the welfare of every person comes first.
Some of the biggest protests in American history have taken place in the last two years. But protests cannot be steps towards solutions, if people remain locked into the belief that this system can be fixed. Our cover story, “Take Up the Vision of a New America!”, points out that the fight is to control the economic abundance the new technology makes possible. A force – a new class – is now emerging that can ensure that digital tools are used to create abundance for humanity, not just more wealth for the ruling class. This new class, being driven outside of the property relations, cannot live securely until society as a whole owns the new means of production and distributes the fruits of social production according to people’s needs.
The article, “Illuminating the Way out of Today’s Social Crisis,” shows that the electronic revolution has forced the American people into a war for their very survival. More Americans than ever before are fighting a war for survival. The resulting mental health crisis, the drug crisis, the rise in suicide, and mass incarceration all reveal that the old world is falling apart. The ruling class’ only solution is to use the destruction to justify creating a new fascist system.
“Hope in Life After Capitalism,” explains how a new world is within our grasp. We have to forge the broadest possible unity in the fight for the necessities of life, such as housing, healthcare, education, decent jobs, and necessary social services. There are countless examples of community spirit, creativity, and compassion that are freely given think what could be unleashed if the ruling class and its system of private property were removed from the picture! We must help point the new manifestations of struggle towards the direction of systemic change.
The technological leap offers us a new society in which humanity can provide for one another. With this vision, the American people have a practical basis to fight forward to the new world that is struggling to be born.
January/February 2019. Vol29.Ed1
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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