The truth that science uncovers for us is more than just the facts. It is about the underlying causes of history, especially these times in which we find ourselves. People know that something is very wrong, but why? The ruling class wants to cover up the answer. Those who are on the bottom, excluded, and who must struggle just to survive, must as a practical necessity understand the real cause of their condition. Once we understand the cause of how we got here, we can then begin to grasp the solutions, the path forward. From grasping reality as it actually is, we can project a vision of what kind of new society we must be about building, and just as importantly, a strategy, a line of march that shows us how we get there.
It is in the interest of the ruling class to deny and to cover up reality, disguising the truth about the world as it actually is. The most important reality that they cannot abide, is that we are in an epoch of transformation, brought on by the introduction of electronic, laborless production that is destroying capital itself and polarizing society. This is the reality, the fundamental truth of our time, and it is this actuality that the ruling class cannot allow to be propagated. They know that once the masses grasp this understanding, it is all over for them.
In this issue, “From the Editors: Sanctuary – Forging Bonds of Class Kinship” exposes the lie that the cause of joblessness is the undocumented immigrant worker. The truth is that the undocumented and immigrant workers are an integral part of a new class of workers being created by electronic technology. The immigrant workers are at this moment, the focus of an attack by the ruling class to pit the growing new class against itself. In response we see a growing Sanctuary movement of churches, individuals, and cities across the country standing up and saying NO! to the ruling class and the State.
“Closing the Gap Between Illusion and Reality” takes a close look at the current “war on science” and the tremendous social response arising to confront that attack. As the article points out, we are living in a new era like no other time in history. At the end of over 500 years of scientific development, the world’s ruling class has reached a point where its greatest enemy is the science that promises to liberate the workers of the world.
“Revolution in Technology Makes Revolution in Society Inevitable” elaborates upon “this profound technological revolution,” which dominates our reality, while at the same time is a time of unprecedented suffering among the masses. The new technology is advancing now at an exponential rate, and the polarization of wealth and poverty is keeping pace with it. Something has to give.
Even some ruling class thinkers are beginning to take notice. The article “Is a Universal Basic Income the Solution?,” shows they are realizing that the jobs destroyed by laborless technology are never coming back. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and writers like Martin Ford and Charles Murray, are all struggling with the problem: How do you provide for people who will never have a job? It is in this context that some are floating the idea of a universal basic income. The proposal seems more like a dead end in the current political process, which is moving in the opposite direction, destroying and taking back what little reforms that remain. But such a proposal does point to the possibility of broadening the actual fight for basic needs and for a new, cooperative world.
“Corporate Money Tries to Control the Movement,” provides another example of how the ruling class, in its battle to preserve private property at all costs, attempts to divide, divert and defeat a united movement of the new revolutionary section of the workers from taking an independent course. The ruling class works through corporate social movement funders to impede, divert and block the natural impulses of the workers for an independent political identity and unity based on the workers common economic needs and class interests. At stake is whether the developing social motion will be corralled or whether it can continue to build along an independent political path.
It is in this environment that the revolutionaries being produced in these critical times have to engage in the propaganda war, in the battle for ideas, to both close the gap between illusion and reality and to illuminate the path to power for a new revolutionary class.
Our new revolutionary class has nothing to lose but its chains, but it requires the truth of history to move the process forward to its completion. This is no spin on reality, no alternative version of the truth. We need only tell the truth as it actually is. It is our greatest weapon, and why in the end we will prevail.
The truth shall set us free.
July/August 2017 Vol27.Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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