Reverend Raphael Warnock, the newly elected African American senator from Georgia, is one of 11 children raised in public housing. His running mate, Jon Ossoff, will become the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. Their campaigns were based on calls for the health care, jobs, and justice crucial for a working class ravaged by laborless digital production magnified by the pandemic. In Georgia, health care workers are being laid off, scores of hospitals are closing for lack of resources, and new records for infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are set every day. Their victories brought Democratic Party control of the Senate for the first time in ten years. This opens the door to a massive struggle over who government is supposed to serve – the corporations that have been looting the country for decades or the masses of people who turned out to vote and make the victories over Trump, Loeffler, and Perdue possible. This will further polarize the Democratic Party, strengthening its working class wing and its impulses toward political independence from corporate politicians.
Their campaigns were powered by a massive voter registration campaign that galvanized young Black, Latinx, and Asian voters in unprecedented numbers. These young people, led by Black women, actually defeated the Republican strategy of voter suppression nationally in November and in Georgia in November and January. Atlanta’s Black women organizers and the voters they registered played a key role. They were aided by a “reverse migration” of African Americans displaced from Rust Belt industries who relocated back to the South, reflecting Atlanta’s transition over the years into an international economic hub and destination for a diverse workforce.
It was this great working-class victory over voter suppression that forced the pro-Trump mob to make its desperate fascist attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The attack drew broad condemnation. It was a fiasco that exposed Trump’s anti-democratic and white supremacist agenda – the same way the civil rights movement exposed the Bull Connor regime in Alabama in the 1960s. Indeed, the defining political motion of our time is the decisive step toward class unity taken during the George Floyd-BLM uprising and its introduction into the electoral arena. The result was the tactical victory against Trump and for Warnock and Ossoff.
And this is not only happening in Georgia. The election victories of Carroll Fife in Oakland, Katie Valenzuela in Sacramento, Cori Bush in Missouri, and many more young leaders at all levels of government reflect the rise of the new class as a social force, a class of minimum wage, unemployed, and other workers being pushed outside of private property relations.
THE PROGRAM OF THE FASCISTS
The context of this political struggle is the profound restructuring of the economy around laborless production based on automation and artificial intelligence. The fact that corporations no longer need workers led to the shocking governmental neglect of the COVID-19 crisis. This, in turn, only intensified demands for unemployment relief, and public investment in health and other infrastructure, even while the economy trends toward remote workplaces and ultimately the permanent elimination of jobs.
The capitalist system is imploding economically and politically. The austerity, the disruption, the destruction of society – the transition to fascist abandonment of the people – has been deeper, faster, and wider than ever before. All the institutions that were built on the need for a healthy working population are being broken down.
Rev. Warnock called the Georgia victory a “reversal of the old Southern strategy that sought to divide people.” The victory of an African American who campaigned on the needs of the working class in a major southern statewide election indeed represents a new level of class unity, but the battle is not over. The ruling class in the South has always been fascist, leading the nation in segregating and terrorizing African Americans and exploiting its working class. Police forces that exercise brute force, as a matter of course, are a legacy from the Jim Crow South. Jim Crow rested on Wall Street’s financial domination of the South, and although Jim Crow was diminished, Wall Street is still there. In Georgia and in the country as a whole, corporate dictatorship continues to be a threat. The banks, transnational corporations, the military-industrial complex, and technology monopolies have no intention of giving up their stranglehold of the economy. They and their allies government will not tolerate interference in their ability to maximize their profits. They pose a mortal danger to democracy that will continue unless and until the people rise up to seize the levers of power away from them.
The mass base for Trump’s fascist attack on democracy drew on the murderous violence and white supremacist oppression of African Americans that is the basis of the Southern strategy. The defeat of Trump has not ended this threat. Over a hundred new proposals for voter restrictions in 28 states were introduced in January 2021 alone. Most of Trump’s challenges to the November election were focused on the mostly Black and non-white communities of Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and other cities that surged with marches and protests against police tyranny and murders. The fact that they were turned back this time does not mean they will not be tried again.
Even with Trump out of the White House, he retains celebrity power. The country underestimated it once, and the fascist social base he built keeps pushing forward. The Proud Boys, the militias, the white nationalists, and their allies in government at every level are still working to recruit from the 74 million Trump voters. The Republican Party is fractured but still mainly led by its pro-Trump faction.
Modern-day fascism is being developed to enable the corporate ruling class to maintain control of our government in opposition to the masses fighting for transformation to a new, just, and equal America. The combined wealth of 647 U.S. billionaires increased by almost $960 billion during the pandemic lockdown, and they have no intention of allowing these profits to be used to meet the needs of the people. The trend toward fascist corporate state will continue to build in both the Republican and Democratic parties unless the people take action to stop it. The coup attempt of January 6 was only the opening battle.
THIRD PARTY IMPULSES
Unfettered corporate rule and mass impoverishment in the increasingly laborless economy, intensified by the pandemic, has caused a fracturing in both major parties, creating the possibility of a new party forming.
The Trump-led MAGA wing supports not only giving free rein to corporate power but also building a mass base of support for an attack on democracy and voting rights. The politicians who supported the mob that attacked the Capitol were Trump loyalists, exposed when 147 Republicans – eight senators and 139 members of the House of Representatives – voted to overturn the electoral vote representing the public will after the January 6 attempted coup.
The traditional Republican Party, counting among its members the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, represents the long-standing corporate-private-property interests that have benefited from Trump policies and funded Trump’s rise. After the attack on the Capitol, this group opposed the open dismantling of democracy as too destabilizing. The dominant Democratic Party “establishment” represented by Biden/Harris also defends the interests of Wall Street as a corporate-private-property party.
A new, independent political grouping is rising out of the demands of the movements, including Black Lives Matter, Occupy, Bernie’s runs for President, the Squad, and continuing through George Floyd rebellions, the Sunrise Movement, youth marches, women’s marches, and water protectors. These forces demand a new model of governance based on meeting the basic needs of society from the abundance created by technology. The class unity developed against Trump fascism has set the stage for confronting the pro-corporate wing of the Democratic Party.
A NEW MODEL OF GOVERNANCE
The movement against the fascist state is driven by the need for Medicare for All, defunding and abolition of the police, prioritizing housing over homelessness, providing basic income, rebuilding public infrastructures such as public health and education, and addressing environmental healing and the climate crisis. The people are fighting for a new model of governance – a new way of governing that is responsive to people’s needs in the era of abundance created by technology. We need a new reality of government managing things, not oppressing people. The people demand the reversal of the gutting of public infrastructure and strengthening of government services to people. They demand decommodification of housing, cancellation of rents, cancellation of debt – including student debt and municipal debt owed to big banks, expand and strengthen voting rights.
Many of these demands strike at corporate-private-property itself by opening the door to transition resources that are now privately owned into public property for public benefit. This new model challenges the continuation of white supremacy – for example, violence against women, attacks on the rights and well-being of non-white workers, indigenous communities, and migrants. These attacks lead to the disempowerment and exploitation of working people as a whole, preventing the new class from uniting.
Georgia and the presidential election has pointed the way forward in new class forces reimagining and defining this new model of governance. Real political democracy leads to and requires a struggle for economic democracy – control of the socially necessary resources for distribution based on need for a decent life.
Published: February 13, 2021
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