The American people are deeply divided. The sharply contested elections of 2020 became an arena in which the ruling class fomented division, strife, and chaos in the struggle to win the battle of ideas over which way to go forward for the country. And if we thought that the matter would be decided one way or another, we are now waking up to the reality that nothing has really been decided; the struggle continues. A recent poll shows that 70 percent of Republicans believe that the election was stolen, and Biden cannot be the legitimate president. Trump continues to stoke the fires of division, signaling a possible run for the presidency in 2024.
Even while Biden promises to unify the country, a deadlocked Congress unable to get anything done is likely to continue. A bipartisan center is no solution to the problems that plague society. Society may be torn apart, but the divisions posed do not really get at the root of the problem. The divisions being put forward are designed to disguise and cover up the real polarization that fuels the social and political struggles unfolding before our eyes. The division is not really between Democrat and Republican; it is not between Left and Right. It is not really even the divisions of race, fomented to divide and conquer a class fighting to survive.
The pandemic crisis and the economic crisis that accompanies it reveal the acceleration and the intensification of the polarization that is gripping society. On the one hand, as our people are dying from the coronavirus at the rate of one per minute every day, and while millions of jobs are being eliminated, the government fails to take any action to resolve the crisis. The food lines grow longer and longer, even as millions face evictions from their homes. At the same time, the stock market sets new record highs, and the rich get richer. The wealth of the richest Americans has increased by $586 billion since the pandemic began.
It is this polarization of wealth and poverty that fuels the social and political struggles underway today. An impoverished class of workers has no choice but to fight to put food on the table for their children, to keep a roof over their heads, to educate them, to secure health care for them. The ruling class, on the other hand, recognizes that this rising class must be contained. They move to merge the corporations with and take over the government in order to defend their wealth and property, and also to attack and divide the class of impoverished workers that is arising. Ruling class and working class are coming to be seen as polar opposites, fundamentally antagonistic to one another.
Until now, our economic system has been capitalism, a system based upon wage laborers who produce the value and profit that the capitalist owners appropriate. Now, new tools of production – electronic, digital, robotic, automated – have been introduced, resulting in massive job loss for millions of workers. And that is continuing at an accelerated pace. Labor-less production is incompatible with capitalism, and it creates a new class that is antagonistic to a capitalist ruling class.
The capitalist rulers are trying to figure out how they can maintain their wealth and property, even as capitalism as an economic system is coming to an end. For them, fascist rule, the end of democracy, and a militarized police state are the solutions they must inevitably move toward.
The battle is class struggle. The unity we seek is not a phony all-class unity that only ends in favor of the ruling class. The unity we seek is the unity of our class around the program of the new class, the fight for a communist, cooperative society which guarantees that the means for a happy and secure life are provided for all. What is communism? Communism is an economic system based on the common ownership of socially necessary means of production. Today the socially necessary means of production include robots, artificial intelligence, digital means of producing goods. An abundance of food, housing, and clothing is being produced without human labor, and should be distributed according to need rather than how much money a person has. It is a system that allows every person to contribute to society.
We have a choice. Out of all of the myriad solutions and explanations that are out there, for the new class of workers, there is only one: unite the class around its program and move forward in the struggle to transform society in the interests of all humanity. The opposite is unthinkable.
Published: December 16, 2020
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