The League of Revolutionaries for a New America is an organization of revolutionaries that describes the current state of human society as entering an epoch of social revolution. One aspect of this epoch is illustrated by widespread poverty at one end of society and untold wealth at the other. The great majority of the world’s people are being forcibly driven into absolute poverty. Children are suffering unimaginable hardship and death. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty, and some 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted. More than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening. In the United States, more than 31 percent of the population experienced some period of impoverishment during the years 2009-2011. Almost 22 percent of children in
America are in poverty.
The other aspect of this epoch is defined by “an instance of a great change in affairs” for human beings. Our history is one of laboring to create those things essential for our survival such as food, shelter and clothing, and continually improving the way we produce them. Under capitalism we receive a wage in return for our labor, which is used to buy the essentials. The rest of the fruits of our labor go to the capitalists, enriching them beyond imagination. This tenuous relationship worked to some degree until more and more of our labor was replaced by computer and robotic production. Everyone from highly skilled to unskilled laborers face great difficulty finding work. How is production and exchange to continue under such conditions? One conclusion that can be drawn is that we should go back to the old methods of production and put everyone back to work. However, development is a progressive process always moving forward rather than backward.
Historically, fundamental changes in how we produce goods have disrupted society and forced a struggle over how to reorganize society to accommodate the new tools of production. Today is no different. Now the new tools are robots and computers, which open up great possibilities for human progress. The gigantic productive capacity allows us to easily provide not only the necessities of life, but also the development of a rich cultured, educated, enlightened life for all. But the rub comes with the private ownership of the socially necessary, socially produced necessaries of life. The capitalist class will not willingly put these to use for the benefit of all members of society.
Unprecedented production and unprecedented want describe our time.
The “recovery” under Obama is limited to the wealthy and the super-rich, who have recovered all of the losses they suffered in the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street crash of September 2008 and have grown richer than they were before the financial crisis. Social inequality has deepened as a result of policies designed to further redistribute wealth from the bottom of society to the top.
“One day before the release of the Census Bureau report Forbes magazine published its annual list of the 400 richest Americans. The combined wealth of these 400 individuals rose substantially from the previous year—from $1.7 trillion to $2.2 trillion. This staggering figure is equal to 12 percent of the total annual gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States and two-thirds of the tax revenues collected in the US in 2013.” (“US Census Report Shows Entrenched Poverty and Declining Living Standards” By Thomas Gaist, Global Research, September 18, 2013)
The capitalists will not let go of what they own and control without a fight. America has become a fascist country which protects their rule. The U.S. is going through a transition from a republic that promised to serve the common good of society to a government that enthrones the corporations and renounces any responsibility to society. In order to control the inevitable social response and to protect private property, the ruling class fosters an American form of fascism that fits this new epoch. They are intent on maintaining control of the means of providing the necessities people need for their own benefit.
How can the workers dispossessed in these times fight to obtain the necessaries of life? Why is the League of Revolutionaries so confident that this fight can be won?
Thousands of revolutionaries
In their unending search for wealth and efforts to remake the world as their empire, the capitalists have created what Karl Marx called their own gravediggers. A new class of workers is being pushed out of the system with no way to survive. This class is pushed into a crisis that can only be resolved with the transformation of private property to public property. The new class is not the “bottom of society.” It is the social force capable of standing the world on its feet. Social destruction is bringing forward revolutionaries who understand that something must be done to right the wrongs. They do not see undocumented workers, poverty-stricken African Americans, Latinos, “white trash,” and children abandoned by this system as the cause of the wrongs or as the enemy.
It takes a mighty intellectual effort to participate in making change happen in favor of the people. Fighting to not lose what we have or to gain a few crumbs is not enough to win. The revolution in the economy is calling forth the forces capable of transforming society. The LRNA Program states: “The new class cannot solve its economic problems without the public ownership of the socially necessary means of production and the distribution of the social product according to need. For the first time an objective communist economic class is forming to become the foundation for a communist political movement.” Thinking and acting in a new way is decisive.
An Organization of Revolutionaries
Thinking people have to come together in an organization in order to make a serious historical contribution to the process of revolution. The League set out from the start to be an organization of revolutionaries arising from an intellectual understanding of the contradiction between society’s productive forces and its productive relations. We are guided by philosophy, the study of processes governing all thought, principles and morals. We constantly study the actual social and economic motion to bring new ideas that conform to the new economic and social situation to the upsurges of the people. These new ideas transform the unattainable struggle for reform within the system into a revolutionary struggle for the political power to achieve these reforms through social reconstruction.
The League was established for this express purpose. World economic revolution has made world political revolution inevitable. It is up to conscious people to guarantee that the revolution is settled in the interests of the common, ordinary people. This is a serious undertaking. We are seeing the beginnings of a new awakening of the people over the destruction of their children’s education, the gunning down of children in the streets by police and vigilantes, and over the decimation of health care. The League unites with this awakening in order to unite the upsurges with the ideas that give them new goals and understandings that conform to new realities.
History thrusts upon us the task of building an organization capable of harnessing the intellectual energy and enthusiasm of today’s revolutionaries. The League extends its hand to all revolutionaries who want to be a part of building this type of organization. League members participate in studying, discussing and summing up the revolutionary process in order to propagandize — that is to take the new ideas of this epoch to the people.
Building Block articles help explain a basicconcept of the revolutionary process, challenging readers to explore its meaning for political work in today’s environment.
November/December 2013. Vol23.Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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