The polls have been telling us for some time now that the American people do not believe that the country is headed in the right direction. There is a sense that something is fundamentally wrong and that revolutionary solutions are required. As the vast majority of the people struggle in an economy that no longer produces for them, there is a growing awareness that, as the article, “The Global Economy in the Epoch of Electronics” states that as the pace of automation accelerates, the pace of job loss and the devaluation of the worker follows in its wake. Of course, some respond to this by attacking one another, blaming the immigrant worker or the Black worker, or yearning to go back to “better” days.
Now, though, the American people are deeply troubled and fearful. The ruling class is using the events in Paris and San Bernadino to shift the focus of concern of the workers from the economy to national security. Demagogic and xenophobic rhetoric exacerbates the fear, preparing some sections of the populace to sacrifice democracy itself if necessary to be made “safe” again.
The ruling class is using current events combined with American history and culture during this election season to further consolidate a fascist base and implement a fascist police state. They are promoting ideas deeply imbedded in the psyche of the American people: that America is exceptional and superior, and drawing upon the history of slavery, the genocide of the native peoples and imperial conquests to launch a propaganda campaign of anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric and now terrorism. The growing antagonism and cultural differences between the ruling class and new impoverished and exploited class created by laborless production emerge as the ideological basis for attacking the class, as exhibited by police assaults and murders, attacks against the homeless and the undocumented, the violence against women and children.
We have to look at this current crisis in the context of this process of change as it unfolds. “21st Century Fascism” points out that a developing global fascism is “based upon the objective social destruction of the capitalist economic system wrought by the economic revolution in production.” As the U. S. struggles to maintain its global economic hegemony and its geopolitical domination, it pursues a strategy to destabilize the Middle East by breaking up old national sovereignties and pitting sect against sect and tribe against tribe; by isolating Russia and shifting its aim toward China, preparing for world war.
In the face of a growing polarization of wealth and poverty at home, the ruling class has to crack down here in order to gain compliance to carry out their international goals. The article “Analysis of Forces: Indispensable to Revolutionary Strategy” shows that while the new means of production is indeed destroying the capitalist economic system, it is creating a new class, those displaced by electronics and the robot, “who cannot survive without overthrowing the system and instituting a cooperative society.” The ruling class is doing everything it can to divide, mislead, confuse and defeat the motion of this new class for its emancipation. The goal of the ruling class is to stop the revolution from proceeding on a class basis. Their aim is to prevent the unity of the new class precisely at that moment when unity of the class is objectively possible, based upon the common economic conditions and equality of poverty.
The article “The Fight for a New Vision of Education” also takes note of how the process of the destruction of a capitalist economy takes its toll on public education itself, and how the importance of mobilizing the human mind, the greatest productive power that exists, is essential to solve the catastrophic challenges that threaten humanity today.
But it is out of the very depths of the crisis we confront today that a new vision can emerge, that points the way to a new society. Alongside a San Bernadino there also arises a Chicago, where the young are rising as representatives of a new class that is leading the fight against police murder and a police State. Chicago is the latest of a growing list of the rising response and resistance to police violence, from Trayvon Martin to Baltimore to Ferguson to South Carolina to Staten Island to Cleveland. They are saying, we will not comply, and we will not go back.
These may appear to be dark times, but they are also times ripe with possibility. The antagonism between the mode of production and the mode of distribution is an objective reality. It is the basis for the unleashing of a new epoch of social revolution. We are in the midst of a social revolution that is now underway. It is a time of struggle, even as the process in which we participate is experienced as destruction, instability and antagonism. The new class of workers created by these times is engaged in a life and death struggle to secure the necessary means of life and is compelled to change the world, and to reconstruct society on a new foundation. History is on our side.
January/February 2016. Vol26.Ed1
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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