A new powerful spontaneous movement is arising. It is being driven by the growing inequality of wealth and impoverishment of the American people. It is becoming outraged by the corruption of elected officials who have turned their backs on the growing needs of the people in favor of the corporations and the rich. It is fighting back against the attack on democratic and political rights.
We saw this in the Occupy Wall Street protests, in the demands of the Dreamers and the immigration movement, in the Florida Dream Defenders, in the tens of thousands of people fighting back against the dismantling of democracy in Michigan, to the recent demonstrations against the Zimmerman verdict, and the Moral Monday protests in North Carolina.
They announce with one voice – no law can trump justice.
“A New Stage of a Powerful Social Movement Arises” examines the Moral Monday movement in particular, showing that they oppose the Southern program that the State seeks to impose, and put forward their own program that demands the “necessities of life, for food, for homes and education for their children.”
These embryonic beginnings are drawing the dispossessed of all kinds into activity and politicizing them. This is an essential development of our class as they begin to break their ideological and political ties with the rulers and set out looking for their own independent course. What is the root of the problem, how do they not only redress their grievances, but take advantage of all that is made possible by the new period of time? How do they go about it?
It is the revolutionary’s calling to offer answers to the questions they seek.
Our cover article “Detroit: City on the Edge of Forever” opens with the saying “So goes Detroit, so goes America.” In Michigan, a powerful movement centered largely in Detroit has developed across racial and even party lines to fight the Emergency Manager Law. The ruling class is not going to allow workers it no longer needs to make decisions about its money and property. The Emergency Manager laws have effectively eliminated democracy where they have been imposed, and are being used as a model for the rest of the country. Governed by an Emergency Manager since March 2013, Detroit has been declared bankrupt. The people of Detroit will be forced to sell off the public assets their taxes bought in the first place and destroy the lives of tens of thousands by gutting their pensions, all in order to pay off the banks.
The wholesale transfer of public property to the corporations and the attack on the workers’ legal and political means of redressing their grievances has to be considered also in the larger global context. “War and the Current Situation in Asia” shows how the rise of Asia is exacerbating the scramble for markets created by the spread of laborless production. Encircling China in particular is central to U.S. economic and geopolitical domination. “Korea: The Key Link to the Encirclement of Asia” unmasks the recent controversy over North Korea and shows the integral position that containing North Korea plays in this regard. The cost to the American workers is destruction of education, health care, basic living standards and any hope for a decent future.
While the ruling class makes empty appeals for national unity in the face of “foreign competition,” they are transforming the legal system to guarantee that these increasingly impoverished workers have no say about the government’s protection of the interests of the corporations over society or the billions that are funneled from the needs of the people into militarizing the economy.
The article “New Class, a New Form of Racism, and the Police State” shows how the ruling class has skillfully manipulated the question of race to build the apparatus of oppression. While the target is the new class as a whole, the ruling class takes aim at the Black worker who is at the core of this new class. As with the Zimmerman verdict, we can see that as society polarizes racism tends to become the form rather than the content of the struggle, and that content is more clearly seen as class exploitation and oppression.
Racism, class exploitation and oppression, the elevation of corporate interests above those of the people – are all structural elements of the capitalist system and cannot be done away with unless the capitalist system itself is done away with. Today, the impact of qualitatively new technology is already disrupting the system and opening the way for something new. “Communism Today: Distribution on the Basis of Need” provides a vision of what this new technology makes possible. Revolutionaries put forward answers to the problems that this new stage of the spontaneous movement seeks to solve – that for the first time in history the wherewithal exists to establish a communist system where distribution is based on human need and conforms to our most cherished ideals and ancient spiritual values of sharing, communalism and cooperation.
September/October 2013. Vol23.Ed5
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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