January was named for Janus, the Roman god who always turned one of his faces toward the past and the other one toward the future. We should approach the new year like that, but not let ruling class propaganda about the past cloud our vision of the future. That future is a society without capitalism, which will inevitably result from the destruction of the capitalist system that is already underway. Still, the question is whether the future post-capitalist society will be something won by the revolutionary new class suffering at the bottom of the current society, or whether it will be a new form of fascism, imposed by the ruling class to preserve its private property.
A stark example of the opposed interests of these two classes was the very different Thanksgiving they had as 2020 was ending. Investors pushed stock indexes to all-time highs right after the election, in recognition that there was little chance the new government would start putting the workers’ needs ahead of theirs. As Michael Arone of State Street Global Advisors explained to The New York Times the day before Thanksgiving, “You have a Biden administration likely governed by a split Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, so it eliminates some of the most extreme policies either on the right or left. So markets are celebrating that.”
But fourteen million Americans receiving federal emergency unemployment relief spent their holiday not knowing if the government would act to extend the December 31 expiration deadline. About nine million received Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, covering self-employed workers and others ineligible for regular state benefits. Also 4.5 million were relying on the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which added 13 weeks of benefits to the 26 weeks available in most states.
Federal rules preventing evictions and defaults for non-payment of mortgages or student loans were also set to expire, making it hard for many families to feel thankful about their government. We shouldn’t forget what they went through, no matter which half-steps were later adopted.
Society’s economic transformation from old electro-mechanical technology to today’s digitally-controlled factories requiring little or no human labor will continue in 2021. Though this could create environmentally sustainable economic abundance for all, the ruling class only uses technology to produce profits at the expense of the workers. Dispossessed of secure jobs and incomes by electronic production, they are becoming part of a new class of the marginally employed, the permanently unemployed, and the absolutely destitute homeless. The result is that the capitalist system’s future is to break down, becoming inoperable as millions are forced outside of the market.
Fascism Under New Conditions
The ruling class’s response to the coronavirus pandemic sped up both the growth of this new class and the turn towards fascist methods of control. In the fascism of one hundred years ago in Italy, the government’s goal was to accelerate capitalism by putting certain companies in charge of whole industries. Workers’ rights to fight for better conditions were restricted, their energy diverted by propaganda calling for them to unite with the government against supposedly disloyal ethnic groups and communists. But today’s ruling class merges corporations with the State because the digital economic revolution is destroying capitalism, and they intend to maintain the dominance of private property over whatever comes next.
Of course, leaders of the ruling class are not going to admit that capitalism cannot continue to function in the era of electronic technology. But they already exposed this awareness during the 2008 financial meltdown, when corporations deemed “too big to fail” were protected from market competition by the government. As Obama’s Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke said in 2010, “Governments provide support to too-big-to-fail firms in a crisis not out of favoritism or particular concern for the management, owners, or creditors of the firm, but because they recognize that the consequences for the broader economy of allowing a disorderly failure greatly outweigh the costs.” They are preparing for the inevitability that technological job displacement will spread such “disorderly failure” throughout the capitalist system.
No Way to Reverse
President-elect Biden has promised to prioritize job creation, but there is no way he can reverse the electronic revolution that has raged through the economy during the last several presidencies. It has especially impoverished millions in the South and its border area, home to eight of the ten states with the most unpaid mortgages and rents: Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Missouri. With Southern poverty certain to increase in 2021, the nationwide struggle over the economics of the new American fascism will become especially intense in this region.
Knowing that such struggles are rising, any American president has to further fascist political policies that prepare the State apparatus for greater repression against the fights for people’s basic needs. Those fights really express the struggle of the new class as a whole, but because so many in this class are Blacks and immigrants, class repression against them is often accompanied by racist propaganda spewed by “hate groups.” That makes people think the only American fascists are those who think like Germany’s racist Nazis.
But fascist economics that protect corporations, and fascist politics to crack down on the new class, are being imposed by the ruling class through “respectable” leaders of both political parties, not just by the extremists.
We can be sure that in 2021, the ruling class will need Joe Biden to deal with the “coronavirus recession” by going in the fascist direction already taken by Trump and Obama. They are on a collision course with the growing new class, including people like Tammy Phelps, a divorced mother of 5 in Nebraska who told CNN, “I am the kind of American that needs it now, who never needed it before.
New Class Needs New System
Millions also need help with their healthcare costs, which keep rising despite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as “Obamacare.” While Trump campaigned on ending ACA and Biden promised to maintain it, both ignored the millions of voters who used the Sanders campaign to call for a government healthcare program free of corporate control. This year, the struggle of those demanding nationalized healthcare will heat up again, along with the fight of mortgage payers and renters to keep their housing and the movement of those who are already homeless.
More of these fighters are insisting the government’s responsibility is to act on their behalf, and that is opening many of them to new revolutionary ideas. The new class they are part of cannot solve its economic problems without the public ownership of the means of production and the distribution of society’s production according to need. That is a communist economic system, which means that the destruction of capitalism has created, for the first time, an objectively communist economic class. It has no alternative but to replace the fascism now being imposed by the ruling class with such a new system that represents society’s future. RC
January/February 2021. Vol31.Ed1
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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