Above: a depiction of the rail strike of 1877.
As illustrated by William Z. Foster’s The History of the Communist Party of the United States, America’s workers have been on a path to socialism from the start. This is true for the working classes of all countries, but Foster provides clarity on just what kind of route America’s proletariat has collectively been headed down. This is a process in which during the first generation of the United States, America’s workers had predominantly come to share the Jeffersonian perspective on how revolutionary struggle works. This is a view which only thinks in terms of upholding the 1776 revolution, and doesn’t consider the proletarian struggle which would become America’s defining conflict. Jeffersonianism is concerned with defending the democratic gains that America had won through 1776, but doesn’t account for class struggle, making it a fundamentally bourgeois tendency.
Learning about Jeffersonianism, and how its prejudices initially held back America’s workers movement from becoming independent, was striking for me. Because it’s in my area, the far northern California rural region, where the “State of Jefferson” movement has been in existence since the settling of the west coast. The idea that California is too big—which in my view makes perfect sense—has from the start been used to rally support for creating a government of our own. A government that’s not centered within the massive cities to our south, which exercise tyrannical rule over the countryside like cities tend to do. Absolutely this problem of state lines that favor the metropolitan areas needs to be solved. The other half of this story, though, is one that Jeffersonianism doesn’t account for; this is the part where the infrastructure which America’s workers built and benefited from has been deliberately destroyed.
America’s workers movement grew out of the railroads; as Foster describes, it was the early, desperate efforts to escape the inhumane railroad working conditions that led to the creation of the country’s first unions. For this reason, it’s unsurprising that the capitalist class would one day decide the rail network needed to be made crippled. The engineered American abandonment of rail was a critical maneuver in our ruling elite’s war against the workers; in the scheme to take away the collective power that workers used to hold. This is connected with deindustrialization, and the process where America’s working masses have been mostly pushed into jobs that lack the material leverage which industrial labor has. It’s also connected with the efforts to exacerbate the contradiction between urban and rural, which we will absolutely need to account for in order to bring victory to the workers.
When rural Americans were subjected to this de-development, where the means for connecting with the metropolitan areas got taken away, it made these countryside communities all the more ready to be sacrificed to capital. My Humboldt County area, like so many other parts of rural America, has been experiencing an economic collapse for decades. And when these places have been set up to be needlessly isolated, what comes about is a lack of incentive for the rural younger generation to establish roots where they grew up. This is how we’re getting a “south Korea-fication” of America, in which the youth who can afford to move to the cities increasingly tend to do so.
The “youth drain” phenomenon, seen in south Korea with the concentration of working-age people inside Seoul, is a symptom of the particular kind of inequality we’re seeing develop. It’s an inequality that’s designed to kill economic activity within the rural areas most of all, while turning the cities into ever-more efficient systems for overworking the masses.
These designs that our class enemies are carrying out have brought a profound bleakness, and the damage will only be undone through a foundational reorganization of our economy. The “youth drain” problem alone will require massive new development projects across the rural, ones which resurrect a liveliness that was taken away from these places generations ago. But as we take on this gargantuan restorative mission, there is a particular insight that Marxists have to contribute, one which can earn us the position of leadership among America’s masses.
This is the insight that in order to truly undo the damage financial monopolies have done to America, we will need to not just look to the positive parts of America’s past—as Jeffersonianism does—but also formulate a program that works for the post-monopoly age. That takes into account the irrevocable, fundamental changes which the coming of monopolism brought to how our economy works.
It was when capitalism transitioned to the monopoly era, and the economy could consequently no longer function without being planned, that we basically came to live in socialism; the capitalists have been left with no choice but to adopt the same model which a workers democracy would use, and they implemented this model at least as early as when the First World War brought an unprecedented crisis. Any economic program that allows for America’s re-industrialization will have to be a socialist one, and this is proven by how capitalism functionally evolved into socialism long ago.
The American people already desire to defeat financial tyranny and rebuild their country; we don’t need to convince them that the system they live under is destroying their society, and many of them have also figured out that finance is the culprit. In terms of educating the masses, our main tasks are to combat the right-wing psyop that seeks to connect finance with a “Jewish question”; and to explain to the people why scientific socialism is what’s needed for rebuilding America. As William Foster said about the initial, utopian efforts at building societies beyond the control of the capitalists: “These anti-capitalist expressions represented a groping of the masses for a program of working class emancipation. But they lacked a scientific foundation and a firm set of working principles. It was the historical role of Marxism to give the needed clarity and purpose to this early proletarian theoretical revolt and to raise it to the level of scientific socialism.”
Such is the need that Marxists can fill in relation to trends like the State of Jefferson movement. While we go about with this, we shouldn’t ignore the most reactionary currents within these movements; a reality which Marxists in my area need to confront is that the “State of Jefferson” has often been used as a tool for the neo-Confederate movement, and is in many ways inseparable from it. This is where dialectical analysis comes in; though we shouldn’t romanticize these trends, and pretend they haven’t been used as a vehicle for racist agendas, we must never surrender the rural masses to those who seek to pull them into fascism.
The masses are the ones who will carry out the actual workers revolution; those of us who’ve taken on the life path of being professional revolutionaries are not the ones who will execute the pivotal deed itself. Only the masses are capable of overthrowing the financial dictatorship we live under; the revolutionaries have the duty of taking leadership over the masses, but we can’t gain this position by going ahead of them. This is a lesson that’s especially important to internalize at the present moment, when ultra-leftist adventurism is gaining major traction among activist circles. We need the American masses, and these masses already know that a systemic upheaval is needed in order for them to have a future.
A key piece of context we must provide for them is that when they’ve experienced the destruction of their communities, this destruction has been an attack specifically against America’s proletarian infrastructure. The fight Americans are tasked with is a fight for the power of the working class, and such a fight is fully compatible with the fight for the values of 1776. The proletarian struggle is the next step in the development of America’s revolution, and if we go into the masses, we’ll be able to impart this lesson onto them.
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