The stakes for our multiracial, multigendered and multigenerational working class are urgent and huge. It is essential to grasp the current conditions and to chart a strategic political path to our common future. Election 2020 offers lessons about class power rooted in the history of the U.S. South – in capitalism, white supremacy, and fascist rule, and in oppositional multiracial working class struggles across the centuries. The election also expresses the crises and contradictions of the current political moment. Today’s working class is increasingly impoverished and dispossessed because of the irreversible capitalist crisis based in the ongoing digital revolution. We are dying from COVID-19 and living on a planet in ecological crisis. The political crisis is on full display.
January 6
On January 6, Trump and his loyalists incited and carried out an armed insurrection of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists and believers at the U.S. Capitol, to challenge the Electoral College certification of Biden as president. Certification did happen in the early hours of January 7. This was the action of an organized insurrectionary force embedded within the mob and coordinated with elected officials, law enforcement, and military — active and veterans — who facilitated the mob and removed barricades, unlike the violent treatment of Black lives and progressive movement demonstrators.
The insurrection is an expression of the broad and deep social base for fascism and helps the ruling class assess how quickly they can or how slowly they have to move toward the consolidation of fascist rule. Fascist rule in the United States is a form of class rule that makes use of white supremacy historically and today. And ruling class forces are trying to develop a plan for implementing it – for how they will save capitalism and private property with less and less labor needed to produce and distribute goods and services and fewer consumers able to purchase them.
Trump and his lackeys among elected and appointed officials enabled and engaged in a series of unprecedented events from the November 3 election onward – repeating the big lie that the election was stolen in the face of massive evidence, judicial judgments, and reality to the contrary. This is a pattern Trump forces engaged in throughout his term in office as they pursued a fast track toward fascist rule.
In the early hours of January 7, after the Trump incited insurrection at the Capitol, 139 Republican House members and 8 Republican Senators still challenged the presidential vote. On January 13, the House voted for the second time to impeach Trump for inciting the violent insurrection at the US Capitol – with 197 Republicans opposed. The Senate impeachment trial of Trump ended on February 13 with a verdict of “not guilty.” Trump and his Republican Party minions continue to work 24-7 in Congress, in their home districts, in the media, and at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) to consolidate as much of a social base for fascist rule as possible and to pursue scorched earth policies with the intent of creating massive confusion, destruction, and chaos.
The February 23 Senate hearing on the colossal security breach at the US Capitol during the insurrection on January 6 revealed a total failure of timely sharing of federal intelligence with appropriate DC and Capitol police officials. At the same time, several senators noted that if the protesting forces had been Black, Brown, or Indigenous — the police would have shown up in full riot gear with reinforcements, including the National Guard, to quell any uprising.
The Terrain We Are On
Working class and movement organizations, many led by Black women and propelled by the urgency of the moment, overcame extensive voter suppression and mobilized in record numbers in the midst of the pandemic to vote in 2020. The presidential vote was primarily a vote to defeat Trump and the rapid motion toward fascism and was not, for the most part, a vote for Biden.
The electoral terrain is difficult to navigate. Over 361 voter suppression laws are pending and/or passed in 47 states, disproportionately in the South, to block working class voters, especially voters of color, from exercising their vote and voice.
The ruling class and its two political parties are fraught with contradictions. The current moment has revealed the capitalist class interests in both the Democratic and Republican Parties and how they rule and control the working class. The center cannot hold. The polarization and fracturing within both ruling class parties and between the classes is erupting.
The government’s totally inadequate response to the basic needs of the people and the planet is in plain sight. While the US working class is being thrust ever deeper into poverty and crisis, US billionaires reaped $1 trillion since the beginning of the COVID pandemic in March 2020, with the stock market climbing to new highs. This absolute polarization of wealth and poverty has to be interrupted. The historic material and ideological reality of white supremacy and gender oppression within capitalism – from the earliest phase of colonialism, genocide, and chattel slavery to the present – is expressed in every aspect of our lives. The Biden-Harris administration is squarely in the Wall Street corporate wing of the Democratic Party and is proposing, at best, concessions that do not disrupt capitalism. The ruling class is fighting to protect their power, wealth, and private property. Fascism is the only political path open to the ruling class to defend their needs and interests, whether slow or fast tracked. But, fascism is not inevitable.
Working class forces are in the fight of our lives. In the main, we have been fighting tactically for our immediate needs and survival. It’s important that our electoral participation and our defense of the right to vote not become a defense of bourgeois democracy, and that we move toward political independence from the ruling class. Our fight is ongoing. This moment is critical to lay out our bold vision of the world we want and need.
This is a powerful learning, teaching, and acting moment. None of us — regardless of our class – can do just what we want to do, because we want to do it. We can only do what conditions allow us to do. So we have to make a careful strategic analysis of conditions, forces, and motion. Strategically, we know that we have to overthrow the capitalist system and white supremacy, as an ideological and material force within it, in the U.S. and globally. To move toward this revolutionary resolution, we have to connect our tactics to our strategy. A few key tactical processes for working class struggle that fight capitalism and ruling class control include breaking from capitalist class political parties, making demands that confront the capitalist system, and political education that moves working class forces toward revolutionary class consciousness and struggle for the future.
Working Class Unity
Today’s multiracial working class has to break from both ruling class parties. And we have to move toward forming a working class third party that is politically independent from the capitalist class. To accomplish this, we need to continue our participation in the electoral process and in the ongoing policy struggles around solutions to our problems. The demands and solutions we put forward have to fight capitalism and take our struggle on the offensive. Our survival depends on the protection of the earth, and the distribution of the vast abundance of goods and services based on human need, and not ability to pay. A few specific examples of political tactics to fight capitalism that various fronts of struggle are demanding include unified action as a political tool of working class power, abolition of the police and prison industrial complex including ICE, implementation of a green plan for a 100 percent renewable carbon free energy system by 2030, and honoring all Indigenous treaties and lands. We have to end our crises, not just lessen our pain.
We need a critical mass of working class forces with a shared vision of the world we are fighting for. This working class unity and class consciousness requires serious study along with political demands and electoral work and struggle in the street. Political education is an essential weapon in the battle for ideas, vision, and the future. We have to break with ruling class ideology and lies of white supremacy. We have to break with ruling class history and its practices of class exploitation, genocide, and gender oppression. To do this means to study society and the world as they really are and have been. It means to understand the revolutionary process and the qualitative change in the economy we are living through. It means to grasp our political task and political challenge of going on the offensive, fighting capitalism, defeating fascism, and winning and holding the future for humanity and our planet. RC
May/June 2021. vol.31. Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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