In preparation for 2023’s struggles, let’s look at what our working class recently accomplished.
These elections followed the 2020 George Floyd rebellion, a “completely transformational moment in our collective history” says the article Defund the Police is Not a Slogan, it is a Demand. Fighters for reform or even abolition of the system of policing mobilized in city councils, state houses, and Congress. In California, they helped elect reform prosecutors and county sheriffs. In Tennessee, Oregon and Vermont involuntary penal servitude was abolished.
The Statement on the 2022 Midterm Elections, by the National Council of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA) reports that millions also used elections to continue their struggles for the right to choose, for healthcare, housing and the right to protest. However, “the real, underlying polarization we face is not between blue and red, but between the wealthy corporate elites and the masses of working people of all ethnicities, colors, religions and sexual identities.”
This class polarization was expressed in changing voting patterns among Latina/o’s, who have historically voted Democratic. Latinas/Latinos and the Midterm Elections explains that in 2020 many South Texas Latinos supported Republican Donald Trump because they saw his calls for oil drilling, the border patrol and law enforcement as providing stable employment.
“The struggles of Latina/os for basic needs, human dignity and rights at the border and in the interior overlap with the needs of the rest of the working class.” As a result “many are concluding that sooner or later they will need their own political party – not abuelita’s Democratic party, but not Jim Crow’s Republican party either.”
Fights for Health and Housing
Disunity among our class facilitates the restructuring of health care in the interests of capitalists instead of people with the greatest needs. Health System’s Collapse Shows Need for Revolutionary Change reports that over the last 20 years “private equity investments in healthcare have increased 20-fold to over $100 billion,” through buying up hospitals and physicians’ practices in low-income communities, then raising prices and diverting funds to more lucrative markets.
This is being challenged in organizing campaigns among doctors and nurses, including in Southertn states like Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas., who “are acting on their burning desire to employ the wonders of science and technology for the public good.”
Throughout Los Angeles, both activists and residents are demanding the abolition of policies criminalizing homelessness, especially by making it illegal to sleep on the streets. Such policies also worsen police abuses of Blacks, who are only 8 percent of the city’s population but comprise 60 percent of the unhoused. A recently released recording even caught members of the City Council conspiring to disenfranchise Black city council members and their constituents.
As General Dogon, a resident of Skid Row and Fight Back organizer from LA CAN states…”it’s all about revolution now, taking it to the next step, organizing the people and creating a serious fight back on the streets. It all starts where it is profit over the people.”
Not one inflated penny more for war
The chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, claims that price inflation results because workers make too much money, but fails to identify corporate profits as part of rising prices. Since the 2008 housing crash, the U.S. government put some $30 trillion into the financial market to bail out banks with inflated housing prices. The so-called experts never refer to this unheard-of creation of new money as inflation.
The United States manipulates inflation to pay for its wars and global political maneuvering, all in the name of defending U.S. business interests. The Pentagon spends $2 billion a day, yet no money can be found to fix the water system of Jackson, Mississippi, which would cost about $1 billion! Inflation is in essence a “hidden tax” that extracts wealth from households and transfers it to the financial system. We all saw how when COVID hit, schools were immediately turned into free food outlets. Government can abolish all forms of corporate financial extraction, but it will not do so unless we force it to.
The hypocrisy of the U.S. government is exposed by the recent Statement issued by the National Council of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America: “[A]s we claim to be defending democracy in Ukraine, government entities in the United States are actively fighting to take away our own democracy.” That fight can only be won if millions of Americans stop our own ruling class’ neglect of poverty and violence here. The Statement challenges this state of affairs: “Let’s end the carnage in Ukraine and on our streets and homes … Not one penny more for the war. Fight to retain and expand our own democracy.”
