What now? The elections are over, and after corporate America has spent over 6 billion dollars on the presi-dential elections alone, and after the candidates have offered us their truncated visions of “forward” (with more of the same, only more so,) or “a new tomorrow” which differs little from yesterday, nothing has really changed. No real solutions, no real reforms have been proffered.
Reality intrudes. Like the aftermath of a superstorm, after the fog has lifted, after all the ideological smokescreens have dissipated, the clear picture of the American landscape that emerges is much like the scene that we saw in the wake of Hurricane Sandy: a devastated society in which many shiver in the dark and wonder where their next meal is coming from. And the ruling politicians have no answer for this.
For those who are seeing their livelihood slip away, and who are being left behind, it is becoming clear that in one way or another people are going to have to fight to improve their conditions. As “Strategy, Mission and the Way Forward” points out, when families are living on the streets and going without food, talk of social and ideological questions is empty. From now on every struggle becomes a struggle over actual interests.
We should not be deluded, however, into thinking that all of the political posturing is only just so much white noise. There is method in their madness. In their strident efforts to protect and defend private property at all costs, they understand that the greatest threat to that rule is precisely that the dispossessed will begin to move in their actual interests. Camouflaged beneath the debate over jobs and joblessness is the fact that the political rhetoric and media spin were aimed at those who had jobs and who are now falling into economic instability and poverty — the dispossessed.
The ruling class recognizes, as do we, that this dispossessed section of the new class is the center of gravity of a class that, when it begins to move, can pull everything forward. The ruling class is throwing everything at blocking the development of that class. Revolutionaries understand that everything depends upon the development of class consciousness and unity.
As it has done throughout history, the ruling class uses race to camouflage and cover up actual conditions and to block the unity of the working class. “Death to Slavery: Ending the Myth of Race in the United States” spells it out: “Race is used to justify inequality and poverty in society and repression and brutality by the State.”
“The Rising Brutality of the State Against Women” has a similar message: “The ruling class uses the weapons of history such as the ideology of male supremacy just as they use white supremacy.” The ruling class will use everything in its power to prevent the new class from becoming conscious of itself and its historical mission.
A new kind of corporate/market State is also emerging to stem the revolutionary process. This market State was also a major question that emerged during the electoral process. The politicians of the two ruling class parties put forward no real solutions, as the State blocks any effort at real reform and accelerates the process of the destruction of any remnants of the social contract.
Our very democracy is at stake. The merger of the corporations and the State makes it clear that the only solution for the ruling class is a fascist solution. The question for the revolutionary class and its leaders is then, what is the way forward if there is no legal or political redress of grievances? On the one hand, as the article “The Future of Property” points out the State is moving toward fascism to protect private property. On the other hand stands a new class of propertyless people, with no ties to private property, whose actual interest is the abolition of private property.
So perhaps all of the electoral mayhem has done us a favor. Perhaps through the smokescreen the air is clearing. The emperor has no clothes. We are beginning to see now the lay of the land; when all of the tired rhetoric reveals no solutions, we can dispense with all of that. We can be about the real task that history has placed before us. We can begin the actual tasks of a new class destined to obtain the political power to reorganize society in the interests of all humanity.
November/December 2012.Vol22.Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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