America is a social tinderbox. The inequality that’s provoked the gilets jaunes protests in France is small compared to what Americans are experiencing. As the United States maintains some of the largest wealth and income inequality in the developed world, it’s in the interests of the vast majority of the population to revolt against their corporate government. Most Americans don’t have more than $1000 in savings, around half are in or near poverty, and a third of American households have struggled to afford food, shelter, or medical care. The state of the nation makes it guaranteed that sometime soon, there’s going to be a mass protest movement in America as people look to direct their anger at the millionaires and billionaires who’ve rigged the economy. It happened eight years ago with Occupy Wall Street, and it’s bound to happen again on a much bigger scale.
As a socialist, I’ve decided the question we need to worry about isn’t whether a class uprising will happen, but whether we can direct it towards an explicitly anti-capitalist agenda. When the next Occupy happens, we can’t let it have a generalized egalitarian message like happened last time. We need to tie our protest efforts to the goal of socialist revolution.
An openly pro-socialist mass movement wouldn’t be as easy to marginalize as it would have been during the era of Occupy. The terminology of socialism, and Marxist ideas specifically, again have major roles in our discourse. The counter-revolutions of three decades ago didn’t bring about the “end of history,” but a miserable era of neoliberalism and inequality that’s inevitably created a yearning for revolution among the lower classes.
This new hope for the socialist movement isn’t embodied in “democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Their goal is to reform capitalism, so they can really be called social democrats. We should not try to create a mix between capitalism and socialism, because the attempts at this in the Scandanavian countries have inevitably resulted in a return to plutocracy. We need to work towards a socialist worker’s state where the major industries are nationalized, and where, as Marx and Engels wrote, the revolutionaries “raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class.”
Versions of such a state have been very successfully established in many countries throughout the last century or so, from Russia to east Germany to Vietnam. And to make it happen in America, we have to unite poor and working people behind a socialist vision that applies to the protest movements which will soon appear.
This will require work. Those among the growing circles of people who’ve been radicalized towards socialism will need to participate in the movement not just by promoting it online, but by building the institutions behind it and by helping with the strikes, blockades, sit-ins, and street demonstrations needed to force through change. This isn’t to say voicing advocacy for the socialist movement won’t be important though; socialists’ path to power is to make the coming protests fit our agenda. Ways to influence the protests in this way range from marching with anti-capitalist signs to becoming part of organizing groups and advancing the socialist agenda from within them.
My fellow socialists, as you do this work in the coming months and years, be encouraged by the fact that we’re now in an exceptional time where radical upheavals can easily happen. The ruling class is once again afraid of an uprising against capitalism, and some of them have openly admitted it; this week, billionaire investor Ray Dalio urged his fellow elites to reform capitalism to avoid a complete turnover of the system. Wrote Dalio: “We are now at a juncture in which either a) people of different ideological inclinations will work together to skillfully re-engineer the system so that the pie is both divided and grown well or b) we will have great conflict and some form of revolution that will hurt most everyone and will shrink the pie.”
While Dalio is aware of the inequality crisis, his claim that a socialist revolution would hurt the economy is not supported by the history of socialist experiments, and his reformist diagnosis for the crisis ultimately stems from an unwillingness to give up the systen that’s enriched him so much. We can’t let the billionaire class negotiate their way into a continuation of their power. We need to overthrow them. And as the World Socialist Website’s Andre Damon assessed this week, this is where the economic populist movement is inevitably leading: “What haunts the ruling class is not left-talking figures within the Democratic Party such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but rather the objective impulse toward mass working-class struggle and hostility toward capitalism. Though only as yet in its initial stages, the growth of the class struggle will inevitably bring about a development of explicit anti-capitalist and socialist sentiment.”
Indeed, the uprising we’re all anticipating is already in motion. Strike action in America alone is now at a 32-year high, and the modern Poor People’s Campaign has been using civil disobedience to empower the victims of capitalism. As developments like these turn into a gargantuan force in these next several years, let’s make them into a tool for socialism.
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