Editor’s Note: In this issue of Rally!, we are publishing the Program of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA), adopted by delegates to its 11th Convention held in June 2022. The Program describes the crises facing humanity and the earth, explains the actual process underway in society, presents LRNA’s basic view, and establishes its immediate political tasks. Rally! is the political paper of the LRNA.
Our country and the world stand at a crossroads. Humanity has the potential for economic security and abundance. A community of the people, by the people, and for the people, where children can grow in peace, is possible as never before. Or–if we do nothing—we face increasingly unlivable conditions caused by private ownership of the wealth that human labor has created. The purpose of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America is to build consciousness and unity among the most impacted workers, to be able to secure the needs of humanity and avoid the destitution and environmental disaster threatening life on our planet as we know it.
As people struggle to survive war, climate catastrophe, poverty, and pandemic, a new fascist state form is arising to crush us – the naked rule of corporate power. It uses the historic American weapon of white supremacy to attack communities of color, divide the working class, and rob the American people of our vote and the limited legal rights we have left. White supremacy is the legacy of the settler colonialism, slavery, land theft, and genocide of indigenous peoples that America was founded on. Fascism resorts to violence to control the working class, even controlling our intimate relationships and our personal identities. Society must replace corporations and financial institutions with publicly owned entities, or else they will continue to fasten their fascist grip over every aspect of our lives.
Today’s economic revolution is creating a new class of displaced workers, who must try to find work in a system that no longer needs them. They are part-time, contingent, minimum, and sub-minimum wage or unemployed workers, including vast numbers of refugees, migrants, people of color, women, and youth. In the United States, the legacy of slavery ensures that African Americans are at the heart of the growing numbers of this class as it struggles to survive the end of sustainable work. The advent of AI (artificial intelligence) represents a new kind of robotics that is automation without human involvement on an even higher level. The blood-sucking private property system is replacing us with new technologies.
While the productivity of digital technology makes shared well-being possible for all humanity, the private property system is driving workers into destitution and often homelessness and speeds up the extraction that is destroying the earth. The rapidly accelerating extinction event we experience today has created a race between revolution and annihilation.
We have never been here before. Workers being displaced by the market are becoming a revolutionary class, because we have no stake in the system and cannot survive without confronting it. We need food, housing, education, and healthcare. We need an opportunity to contribute to society and to help save the planet. We need freedom from police terror, mass incarceration, and gender oppression. We fight for a government that takes care of people first. Ultimately this requires public ownership of the means to create wealth – the land, infrastructure, and technology – and distribution according to need. The fight for basic needs propels every other social struggle, because none of society’s social, moral, or ecological problems can be solved as long as the private property system exists.
This revolutionary class of workers is arising everywhere around the world. Global unity with and among those most impacted by the current crisis is central to the freedom of humanity the world over. We must make every effort to unite in global struggles.
The 2020 rebellions showed that today, whether through words or deeds, masses of socially conscious people are declaring themselves revolutionaries in opposition to the system’s poverty, racism, and ecological disaster. The League’s mission is to unite with other revolutionaries around the demands of the working class, especially the class of displaced workers, and show how the solution is a cooperative, communist society, where social wealth is owned in common and distributed according to need.
Victory cannot be won without class unity based on exposure and rejection of the white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy so deeply rooted in the structure of the American economy, politics, and history. In the practical struggle, people are uniting from below. The growing equality of misery is forming them into a social force. We rely on this developing practical unity to build conscious political understanding. Victory cannot be won until we gain the political power necessary to defeat fascism and organize the cooperative society we need.
We fight shoulder to shoulder with all social and political organizations and sections of society that seek to put an end to poverty, social and ecological doom, fascism, and war. Without a vision, the people perish. Human beings have proven that they can survive the barbarism of slavery, famine, and world wars, and build a better world out of destruction. History has given the present generation a great mission: to save the world for the future of life on earth.
The battle is a class struggle because the ruling class is the enemy of humanity and the earth itself. The program of the workers who are being displaced is showing the way. We in the League welcome and will join with every effort to unite around the demands of the revolutionary class and secure the imperiled future of life on earth.
July/August 2022 vol.32. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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