In the U.S. today, a growing movement is taking shape that is increasingly demanding that government agencies and elected officials take responsibility for the welfare of the people. At its center are those struggling for clean and affordable water, for food, housing, public education and healthcare. The government is rejecting these demands, while intensifying its assault on those it no longer needs. These demands come from a rapidly growing section of the working class – a new class – those thrown out of, or to margins of, the U.S. economy and society. Their scattered struggles all have a common cause. Combined, they become a common demand for nationalization in the interests of the people.
Our cover article, “Jovencidio – Capitalism’s War on Youth is War on Society,” shows this process in the struggle for public education, against the corporate education industry seizing and privatizing public education, to both loot the national budget and indoctrinate a new generation. To gain public control over education means nationalizing it, so the government will guarantee everyone a lifelong, free, quality public education.
“From the Editors: Flint: Water is a Human Right,” shows the horror of how the rulers will not provide anything—not even clean water—to workers they no longer need. Clearly, our class needs to build an independent political movement to make water a public trust, not subject to private ownership. Such a movement will protect access to water for everyone and will not allow private control that threatens our planet’s ecosystem, while polluting the lifeblood of our people. Gaining control over public access to water means nationalization of the water, where the government is made responsible for guaranteeing everyone has access to clean and safe water.
Such common cause allows our class to become more broadly aware of the class nature of U.S. society. The demand for nationalization broadens common political struggle, allowing our class to begin breaking its historic ties to the capitalist class, freeing it to put forward its independent political program that represents its class interests.
If the capitalists refuse to implement such a program, their failure to implement it exposes them and the system. “Take the Strategic Offensive” shows that putting forward the demand for nationalization prompts a debate among the workers that revolutionaries can enter into—a debate about whom the state serves, and which points our class in the direction of confronting the ruling class, its State, and the whole question of who owns society’s productive property.
The February 2016 LRNA political report, “Fascism, the U.S. Presidential Elections and the Tasks of Revolutionaries,” analyzes the elections in the context of the growing struggle in America for the basic necessities of life. It shows that the awakening among these workers that something is wrong with society is now beginning to move to an understanding that workers are a class. The rulers are unleashing a massive propaganda war to keep the thinking of society tied to private property. The elections are a means for them to test ideas, deepen divisions, crush the impulse for class unity, consolidate a social base for fascism and build a fascist movement. They are trying to divide the new class, stigmatize it and isolate it from society. Using history, they begin their attack against the poorest Black workers first. They are trying to portray Blacks as “shiftless, can’t hold a job, won’t finish school, use drugs, and are criminally inclined.” As this beachhead is established, they move on to put the so-called white “trailer trash” and “illegal” immigrants into the same category. If accepted by the American people, this sets the basis for the rulers to impose fascism on society as a whole.
While many workers are being moved by the rulers toward a more fascistic outlook, a growing number within the new class are moving toward a more class-based position. It is these impulses the rulers seek to block. Revolutionaries have to grab hold of and develop these arising seeds of class awareness, no matter how contradictory and embryonic they are.
The new class holds within itself, the force necessary to overturn the capitalist system. But without an understanding and an ideology that expresses and reflects its interests, its potential will inevitably be blunted, distorted, and turned to serve the interests of the rulers. The gap between illusion and reality must be overcome, as the article, “From Communism to Communism” shows. In some way or another, this has to be done, because only a political act will change the social relationship. That political act can only come about, if there is a real understanding of today’s economic and social reality that is called the world. This clearly shows the urgency for revolutionaries to work as propagandists – bringing strategy, direction and vision to the class.
March/April 2016 Vol26.Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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