The protests that have emerged in Ecuador throughout the last month are the culmination of a boiling point that the country’s people have reached after being subjected to sustained attacks on their livelihoods through neoliberal policies. Betrayed by their supposedly progressive president Lenin Moreno, who’s restored market forces and aligned foreign policy with the U.S., Ecuadorians have watched with anxiety as their formerly socialistic country has been steadily restored to its bleak neoliberal past throughout Moreno’s two years in office. But the people have struck back at the colonizers and the capitalists; with intensive protests and civil disobedience throughout the last month, Ecuadorians have forced the government to give up its attempted austerity measures.
If two years is how quickly the Ecuadorian people have been able to stand up for themselves in the face of encroaching predatory capitalism, why haven’t the American people done the same after experiencing forty years of practically unceasing privatization, regressive taxation, and falling wages? Why hasn’t an American worker-peasant movement emerged in the same vein as the ones which have recently swept not just Ecuador, but also France, Honduras, and much of the rest of the capitalist world? To finally realize such a movement for the United States, we’ll need to institutionally and narratively prepare the country for the next moment when a spark of civil unrest happens within it.
There’s no question that an era of unrest is coming to the United States. So many people in the country have become food insecure, found themselves working paycheck to paycheck, and fallen into gargantuan amounts of household debt that they would be glad to join in on a protest against corporate power if they were presented with the opportunity. When the next recession happens, these people will be hit with a hardship worse than the one from 2008, and a series of protests will no doubt appear in reaction to it sometime soon.
The question is whether America’s radical institutions will be strong enough, and have enough control over the national narrative, to be effective in using this outburst of lower class anger to achieve meaningful change. I want to help clarify to the passionate anti-capitalists who read my work exactly which organizations and narratives they’ll need to align with in order to work as effective change-makers throughout America’s coming revolutionary crisis.
We must learn from Ecuador’s revolt, which has been greatly shaped both by indigenous people and by communists who won’t be co-opted by capitalist institutions and ideas. As the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador has led the way in calling this month’s strikes, it’s been joined by Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities and other pillars of Ecuador’s indegenous communities in organizing the insurrection. Slate’s Stephen Hirst has written about how these indigenous activists, in spite of the odds, have forced Moreno to give up his project to cut off fuel subsidies: “It’s hard [for Moreno] to hold the line when protesters are being killed, roads are closing, oil fields are being occupied and inoperative, and the country is hemorrhaging an estimated $14 million a day. It was a stunning blow to Moreno’s presidency and evidence that, while they may only amount to 7 percent of the population, the indigenous tribes still hold real political power in Ecuador.”
The presence of the communists in this indigenous rebellion has been so important because Ecuador’s political system, like America’s, is designed to buy off ostensibly left-wing figures who are willing to compromise with bourgeois interests. Moreno himself is one of these disingenuous political figures, having run with the promise of redistributing wealth and since having done all he can to appease the ruling class. He represents Ecuador’s version of the Democratic Party, which also works to give people hope while facilitating every part of the agenda of the corporate oligarchy.
To be real revolutionaries, we’ll need to wholly reject working for Democratic candidates, including Bernie Sanders-who has shown many times that he’s willing to capitulate to apartheid Israel, support war operations like the 1999 Yugoslavia bombing campaign, and repeat regime change narratives about countries like Venezuela. Democratic Party uses appendages, such as Democratic-tied “socialist” organizations like the DSA and corporate-funded activist organizations like the Sierra Club, get those who desire change to embrace institutions that stand in the way of socialist revolution. It’s crucial that we recognize these fronts for the capitalist agenda, and build institutions which consistently advance anti-imperialism and class liberation.
What are these institutions? For starters, I recommend joining the anti-war group CodePink, the anti-colonialist African People’s Socialist Party, and the non-reactionary arms training group the Socialist Rifle Association. In terms of organizing immediate civil disobedience, we can get involved in the Poor People’s Campaign, which has been carrying out traffic blockages in recent years with the purpose of disrupting capitalism. There’s also much hope to be found in the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Marxist-Leninist organization that’s likely to choose political prisoner and indigenous hero Leonard Peltier as its next vice-presidential nominee. The PSL is the largest socialist organization in the U.S. that professes the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. And despite its small size, the PSL and other groups like it are growing, and they have the potential to become a defining force in the coming societal upheaval.
Marxism-Leninism has this potential because it coherently articulates the anti-government, pro-egalitarian mindset which grips the people who are suffering under neoliberal capitalism. Its goal is to use mass mobilization to dismantle the capitalist state, and to then create a worker-run democracy that enacts measures to eliminate poverty and undo the other destructive effects of capitalism. It’s the most historically effective means for class liberation, as is exemplified in the unparalleled anti-poverty project of the largest existing Marxist-Leninist state China. It’s so effective because once the proletariat has seized the state apparatus, it attains the weapons to drive out the power of the capitalist class and wage a defensive war against imperialist aggressors. It fulfills the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat-which is to say the only genuine form of nationwide democracy.
As Lenin describes this system: “The dictatorship of the proletariat is a most determined and ruthless war wages by the new class against a more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by the overthrow.” Indeed, our task is by definition a war, whether or not it involves violence. We’re fighting to take a class out of power, and as we go forward, this class is going to use whatever means it can to try to crush us. In turn, we must use whatever means necessary to overcome this suppression.
The Ecuador protests haven’t toppled Moreno’s government. But they have shown that the country’s people would be able to topple it if they were to sustain their rebellion for a lot longer. At one point, the protests got so intense that they forced state officials to temporarily move out of the capital. What if this retreat from the capitalists had been permanent, and what if it had been enforced through a governing agenda by the Communist Party and an operation to defend the movement’s new territory with armed force? India’s Maoist guerrillas are now engaged in just this kind of revolutionary project, with them gaining territory by overthrowing local governments.
If worker-peasant movements around the world come to function with this kind of ideological focus and militancy in the coming decades, they’ll have the potential to overthrow numerous capitalist regimes. As residents of the United States, our goals must be to build up Marxist-Leninist organizations like the PSL, get the proletariat engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience as well as armed and trained, and educate people about the coherent strategy for anti-capitalist insurrection that communism presents. The cultural excitement of America’s coming mass protest movement will be the first part of many people’s initiation into the effort towards class revolt. The next step will be educating and equipping these masses to be able to actually seize power from the capitalists.
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