We’re Seeing The First Stages Of What Could Be The Final Implosion For American Capitalism

The system we live under is a drug addict. It’s perpetually fixated on getting the next surge of profits, on maintaining the intake of financial assets that keeps it afloat. If an obstacle appears, it will find a way to keep the flow of capital going by sacrificing the wellbeing of those not in the exploiting class. Now that Covid-19 has presented an obstacle by forcing tens of millions of Americans out of work, the system’s only solution is to siphon vast amounts of wealth to the rich while forcing poor and working people to sacrifice our health and resources.

In terms of the relief fund that the government will inevitably need to pay to keep the economy semi-stable, Republicans and Democrats are both trying to figure out how to give the bare minimum amount of money to the poor. All of the lower income people who are struggling to pay rent, bills, and other expenses will get a payment of only $1200, and the money likely won’t come until around two months from now. Throughout this time, it’s estimated that the U.S. unemployment rate will rise towards about 30%, and a steady income will also become harder to find for many of those who can still work.

This is because our economic crisis isn’t just the result of a quarantine. The quarantine has been one of the catalysts that’s set off a massive and long-foreseeable financial bubble. The debt-ridden housing market is part of it, the unsustainable banking system is part of it, and the inflated stock market is part of it. In the coming months and years, it will escalate into the greatest downturn since the Great Depression, far worse than the 2008 crash.

The planned economic relief efforts will do almost nothing for us. We’ll overwhelmingly still be expected to pay rent, and to give money to the capitalist class in all of the other ways that America’s highly privatized economy requires of us. If one of us gets Covid-19 or any other medical emergency, we’ll still have to pay thousands of dollars to the insurance companies. For over forty years, the capitalist ruling class has made neoliberalism into the world’s dominant economic model because neoliberalism has made them steadily richer. They won’t give up this model now, not even in this time of crisis. So they can only make us redistribute even more of our wealth upward.

As the super-rich have lost hundreds of billions of dollars, and as the country has lost 500,000 millionaires, the Federal Reserve has been re-bailing out Wall Street. This bailout process began early last fall, long before the virus, so it’s clear that the oligarchy has been anticipating the current financial unraveling throughout the last year and has been trying to compensate for the losses. Gloldman Sachs believes U.S. GDP could contract 24% by next quarter, meaning the executives and the big banks will get trillions of additional dollars in financial infusions over the coming months and years.

The Fed may be able to easily manage this job due to the innate ability of governments to create their own fiat money, but how can this money be translated into material value? As Karl Marx assessed, value comes from labor. And without a properly functioning labor force, the capitalist class will continue to lose their economic leverage. So as much as they abhor Marx’ labor theory of value, the capitalists now need to adhere to its rules in order to protect their own interests.

This means that for Donald Trump, Fox News, many Republican politicians, and many of the capitalists who support them, there’s reason to dismiss the extent of the threat from the virus. Even though the U.S. is now the country where the virus is most widespread, Trump is determined to reopen all of the country’s businesses by Easter. The best argument Trump and his camp can find for this idea is that the harm from increased virus cases in this scenario of reopening is outweighed by the suffering Americans will endure if the economy remains largely closed.

While this argument is very likely incorrect and fundamentally callous, it acknowledges the nature of America’s hyper-capitalist, neoliberal economic system. Unlike China, which has universal healthcare, a strong social safety net, and a police force that brings quarantined people groceries, the U.S. has become a Third World country for the have-nots. The newly unemployed masses have practically no support to turn to. So whatever businesses Trump reopens in the coming weeks, there will undoubtedly be many people who disregard the intensifying health risks and start showing up to work again. People will die from Trump’s decision, but Trump and his camp ultimately won’t care, and likely most of the workers will go along with it.

This is how our drug addict system is avoiding change. And it’s why unless a strong welfare state comes to the U.S. and the other neoliberal countries that will be impacted by the economic collapse, global capitalism will continue on its current path of rapidly consuming itself. Now that the bottom has fallen out-the bottom of a labor force that can sustain economic growth-there’s going to be a contraction that continues for a very long time.

America’s economic shrinkage no doubt won’t stop after the next quarter. It could go on for several years, like was the case during the years following the 1929 crash. At that point, the U.S. dollar will likely have declined far more than it has so far in the last two decades, potentially because of a European shift towards another currency. This is becoming more likely as China’s enormous foreign Covid-19 medical aid wins over more countries to the side of the PRC, and as China’s New Silk Road initiative continues to rise; this week alone, Italy joined the New Silk Road in defiance of its allies.

Whether or not the worldwide movement away from the dollar will actually cause the dollar to collapse, U.S. economic influence is going to continue to decline while China continues to rise. This is what will really dig into the assets of the American capitalist class, regardless of how much they try to grab up the wealth of the U.S. working class. American capitalism depends on the continuation of U.S./NATO imperialist hegemony, and China’s movement towards global economic and military dominance is bringing this worldwide power dynamic closer to its end. China’s financial support for many countries that have suffered under neo-colonialism, as well as the anti-colonialist effects of the Belt Road Initiative, are also helping shift the economic leverage towards the countries which the West has dominated for so long.

At some point in the next decade, the U.S. corporatocracy will no longer be able to extract enough profit from the Third World to maintain the American economy’s former size. Combined with the costs from the continued collapse of the climate, this will make the U.S. economy unable to recover from the great crash of the early 2020s.

Or at least it won’t be able to recover for as long as it remains capitalist; history shows that socialist countries are able to improve the living standards of their people while avoiding catastrophic recessions. This means that in the coming years, far more of America’s poor and working people will have the potential to embrace the cause of socialist revolution, which is the only thing that can save them.

This scenario-economic meltdown amid irreversible imperial decline-is the chain of events that can lead to capitalism being replaced with socialism inside a core imperialist country. We poor and working class people in America may be facing a great hardship, but we can find our collective power by recognizing that the advantage is ultimately shifting away from our capitalist oppressors. Then we can organize towards the defeat of this system and the implementation of one that ends our misery.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744

Socialism Can’t Survive Without A Dictatorship Of The Proletariat

By the time of the death of Stalin in 1953, the Cold War was in full force. NATO and the CIA had been formed with the purpose of countering Russia, and Washington was intent on overthrowing the government of the USSR as part of the campaign to defeat communism. An era of proxy warfare had begun against the Soviet Union, complete with spying, propaganda, military buildup, and economic sanctions.

The response from Nikita Khrushchev, the new first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was unsurprisingly to make concessions to Washington to help ensure peace. Under this rationale, Khrushchev and his clique abolished the dictatorship of the proletariat-which is to say the model of democracy that exclusively put power into the hands of the workers-and largely restored capitalism within the country. As a result, by the mid-1960s unemployment had reappeared in the USSR, and by the 70s, deals had been made with capitalists in multiple countries to exploit Soviet labor and resources.

It was a different paradigm from the Stalin era, one that didn’t work ideally for the people who were experiencing poverty from the effects of these reforms. So the U.S. took advantage by trying to sow anti-government sentiment among potentially disaffected Russians. A 1969 U.S. memorandum mentioned that “desire for improvement in the quality of life” among Soviet citizens was one of the social factors that Washington saboteurs could use to create support for regime change in Russia.

Ultimately, the USSR’s political and economic systems couldn’t handle the cost of arms buildup and Western proxy warfare, and Gorbachev facilitated the transition into an officially capitalist new federation. Why was the country unable to handle these challenges? Socialism collapsed in Russia and other countries throughout the late 80s because as the Korean communist leader Kim Jong Il wrote: “they neglected class education and abandoned the class struggle. After assuming state power, Khrushchev weakened the function of the dictatorship of the state as a weapon of the class struggle. As a result, socialism could not be defended in the Soviet Union.”

I believe Kim Jong Il was right about this because when you compare the political developments of the USSR and the GDR to those of the socialist states that still exist, there’s indeed a clearly consequential contrast between how they’ve navigated geopolitical and economic obstacles.

The USSR’s partial adoption of private business hasn’t been unique to socialist countries. China has enacted similar economic reforms, and the DPRK has also worked to incorporate private markets. But unlike was the case for Khrushchev’s policies, the market reforms of these countries have been done out of objective economic necessity. China was a poor country during the post-Mao era when its pro-capitalist reforms began. And the DPRK has needed to open up to foreign capitalist markets since the USSR collapsed, and since the DPRK subsequently needed to seek new outside sources for supporting its economy.

The USSR, though, had already become newly industrialized and fairly prosperous by the end of Stalin’s time in office. The pro-capitalist reforms weren’t necessary for keeping the country in a stable economic state, and unlike has been the case for the PRC and the DPRK, the USSR’s fundamental structure of government was changed along with its economy. The USSR was set on the road towards becoming a country whose leadership Washington could easily sway towards abandoning the cause of socialism. This pitfall has been avoided not just by China and the DPRK, but by the other currently existing socialist states Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos.

These distinctions between the nature of the concessions that Khrushchev’s camp made vs the concessions that Chinese and Korean communists made became so consequential because of the differing conditions that befell the USSR/GDR alliance and the China/DPRK alliance. The U.S. didn’t launch a nuclear arms race against China during the first several decades when its socialist development was being built up. China has been able to become steadily more rich, prosperous, and powerful since the end of the Mao era, and this has allowed it to maintain its socialist system while continuing to provide support for the smaller surviving socialist countries.

The resulting situation for 2020 is one where the Communist Party of China is not just mostly supported by an increasingly prosperous population, but is on its way towards surpassing both the economic and military power of Washington. The PRC and its socialist allies have avoided the fatal error of Khrushchev, and they’ve come into an increasingly advantageous position because of this.

Abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the capitalists and imperialists gain the upper hand.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744

A Socialist, Anti-Colonial Revolution In America Would Mean The Death Of Global Imperialism

The logo of the Pan-American People’s Liberation Party

Envision a future where the territory now called the United States, along with the other countries in the hemisphere that exist as a result of colonialism, have been converted into a great swath of nations which are once again controlled by the indigenous tribes. Imagine a scenario where U.S. imperialism is defeated once and for all through the abolishment of the U.S. itself, which was created through the imperialist theft of indigenous land and the subsequent slaughter of most of the region’s indigenous people.

It can feel challenging to imagine this coming about, because colonial occupation has been the reality throughout the vast majority of the hemisphere for centuries. Yet in instances like Haiti’s anti-slavery and anti-colonial revolution of 1804, or Cuba’s socialist revolution against a U.S.-backed dictatorship, or the restoration of indigenous rule during Evo Morales’ 14-year socialist presidency, cracks in the wall of colonial and capitalist control have appeared. By examining the pre-colonial past, the history of anti-colonial resistance so far, and the present conditions surrounding colonialism and capitalism, I can construct a picture of what an anti-colonial revolution in this hemisphere will look like.

The great civilization that the First Nations were building-and that they should be able to resume building

The pre-colonial nations in the continents now called North and South America were not the sparsely populated, “primitive” societies that colonialist lore portrays them as. There were as many as 112 million Natives in the pre-contact Americas, with around 90% having been killed by disease, violence, and biological warfare in the following centuries. Many of their nations ran on democracy, and far from all being isolated to their own territories, the inhabitants of these nations passed around resources throughout vast distances around the continent. They had made many technological advancements that the Europeans hadn’t. And rather than having all lived in tepees as media portrayals suggest, the different indigenous societies had a diverse range of housing.

It’s necessary for me to dispel the settler narratives about who the continent’s indigenous people were back then, because American culture’s ingrained disdain for these societies prevents popular support for decolonization. Our society, particularly the country’s communist movement, must recognize that returning sovereignty to all of the indigenous nations is a feasible and necessary way to rectify the injustices against colonized peoples.

By “colonized peoples,” I mean not just the indigenous people but the black people. These groups have experienced centuries of genocide as a result of the project to make the continent into a hub for imperialist power and capitalist profits, and an anti-colonial revolution will necessarily include an effort towards restorative justice for both of them. 

Therefore, the governmental structure that exists in North America after such a revolution will need to consist of the following aspects:

-The abolition of colonial states; the European-created governments occupying indigenous nations must be disbanded.

-The creation of the modern equivalent of the indigenous confederacy that the leader Tecumseh tried to create; after the colonial governments are abolished, their militaries should be seized and put under control of a democratic indigenous confederacy which consists of all the First Nations.

-The creation of an African Autonomous Oblast, where African descendants receive reparations for slavery and an independent African nation. (This territory would be formed after the appropriate cooperation between the First Nations.)

-A First Nations Citizenship program for non-natives, one where settlers who either don’t want to be part of the First Nations or aren’t eligible for First Nations citizenship are deported to their ancestral homelands. In other words, a removal of the white supremacists who pose a threat of committing violent acts.

-Abolition of all colonial prisons, the creation of a restorative justice system for criminal recidivism, and a re-education campaign where the colonial textbooks are replaced with factual accounts of the indigenous genocide.

-Continental universal healthcare, housing, food, and education, along with a full employment program that conducts ecological restoration, sustainable agriculture, and the building of a renewable energy system. This will only come after the seizure of the means of production from the capitalist class all throughout the former American colonies (which will happen in time as the autonomous First Nations develop towards socialism).

The post-revolutionary arrangement within South America would for the most part be the same, so long as this revolution is also oriented around anti-colonialism.

What the anti-colonial and class struggles within the hemisphere have been able to accomplish so far

Colonialism and imperialism still haven’t been thrown off throughout the vast majority of the Pan-American hemisphere because capitalism has developed along with these systems, and capitalism has created vast mechanisms for keeping the colonial power structures in place. The white settlers in the bourgeois class and the relatively privileged proletariat have lacked the economic incentive to overthrow the capitalist and colonialist systems, because they’ve stood to benefit from the continued subjugation of the colonized. And since these privileged groups have naturally always been the ones with the most ability to participate in capitalist electoral politics, the social contract has sustained itself.

These settlers have attained their control through means of violence against the populations which have stood in the way of capitalism and settler-colonialism. Slavery, forced transfers, mass killings, and campaigns of terror have served this purpose from the start, keeping the African and indigenous peoples from stopping the success of settler-colonialism in the hemisphere. In the last century or so, eugenics against the colonized peoples has also been part of this. The proliferation of police forces throughout the capitalist world, along with the rise of global U.S. imperialism, have perpetuated the control of the U.S. empire both internally and externally.

Aside from repressing the colonized peoples and the proletariat throughout the imperial core, much of these engines for imperialist violence have been used for preventing revolutions in Washington’s foreign colonies. As capitalism has developed, they’ve also served to re-colonize decolonized lands through economic means; the financial entrapment of Latin American countries to large corporations and the International Monetary Fund has involved death squads, brutal repression of people who’ve rebelled, and violent coups against leaders who’ve worked against the financial interests of the empire. In this way, the past decolonizations of various lands have become mainly symbolic victories for anti-colonialism, because the capitalists have nonetheless retaken control over these lands.

This spread of neo-colonialism has correlated with the last century’s vast campaign to stop the spread of socialism throughout Latin America. There have been at least 56 U.S. interventions in Latin America, and the U.S. has interfered in the elections of the vast majority of Latin American countries since World War II. The only socialist Latin American countries that still exist are Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela, with Bolivia having been socialist-controlled last year before Morales was overthrown in the latest U.S. coup.

Despite imperialism for the most part holding back Latin America’s development towards socialism so far, the hemisphere’s existing socialist countries demonstrate that this situation has the potential to change. As Nelson Mandela said, socialist Cuba and its aid for the anti-colonial movement in South Africa “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor.” It showed that when a nation arms itself well after breaking away from imperial control, it can avoid being reconquered and spread the revolution to other countries. Venezuela’s Chavista government, with its three-million-strong people’s militia, is following in this example.

These keys for breaking away from imperial control-a popular movement, a socialist revolution, and a project to create a strong national defense against imperialism-are being increasingly pursued by those who would lead the hemispheric revolution that I’ve described.

The obstacles that the current Pan-American revolutionaries must overcome

The immediate priorities of the Pan-American socialist and anti-colonial revolutionaries are to save all the current regime change target countries from being overthrown by the imperialists, to further the rising anti-capitalist and anti-colonial popular movements throughout Latin America, and to protect indigenous people from the escalating abuses that the colonial governments are carrying out. The latter cause mainly pertains to the indigenous migrant concentration camps of the United States, to the Canadian government’s use of police and paramilitaries to force through a pipeline within tribal land, and to the Bolsonaro government’s campaign to enact genocide against Brazil’s uncontacted tribes for the purpose of advancing business.

In addition to these crimes by the hemisphere’s three biggest colonial governments, Bolivia’s U.S.-installed fascist regime has been enacting violence against indigenous people for defending their democracy. Similar horrors have occurred as U.S.-backed Latin American regimes like Chile have responded to the last year’s anti-neoliberal protests by committing widespread atrocities. We’re experiencing an intensification of warfare from the imperialists, one that’s happening in reaction to the surge of immigration, the decline of American power worldwide, and the recent rise of revolutionary mobilization from the have-nots.

In these respects, the system is getting more vulnerable, especially as economic collapse now envelops the United States. Amid this great 21st century crisis of capitalism, where the bourgeoisie are suddenly experiencing falling profit rates while the living standards of the masses are quickly in decline, we can advance the next goal of our movement: rallying poor and working people towards trying to overthrow their capitalist governments.

Perhaps the next Cuba-esque socialist revolution will happen in Bolivia, where many of the country’s disenfranchised indigenous proletarians have been demonstrating and gathering in militias since last year’s coup. Given how Bolivia’s fascist government has been working to rig the currently delayed upcoming election, the revolutionaries will only be able to realistically win by building up institutions like the Marxist-Leninist Maoist Communist Party of Bolivia, all while sustaining a civil disobedience movement and a potential armed struggle amid violent state repression.

The more the class conflict develops around the globe, the clearer it becomes that Bolivia’s situation of dictatorship and violent struggle is going to be the future in many places. Fascism is rising around the capitalist world, from India to Brazil to the United States. The pretenses of democracy are being dropped, and militarized policing, eroded civil liberties, and unfettered corporate pillage are becoming more normalized. To get an idea of where many capitalist countries are headed, look at Honduras, where society has been highly militarized and a right-wing regime has held on through rigged elections since the imperialist coup in 2009.

Electoral politics isn’t how we’ll win. Our task will depend on raising support for anti-colonial and socialist revolution, building the communist parties that can facilitate a revolution, and mobilizing the movement’s members towards strikes, blockades, demonstrations, and efforts to defend from state violence. This was roughly how Cuba’s revolutionaries defeated the country’s Batista dictatorship, and it’s how we’ll throw down the remaining tyrannical regimes in the hemisphere.

The world we’ll be able to build after the United States is overthrown

The struggle for complete Pan-American liberation will be long, and will be especially difficult to win within the imperial core. But those in the U.S. can take comfort from Che Guevara’s words: “I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all — you live in the belly of the beast.”

Every step we take to weaken the authority of the U.S. government, as well as every step we take to weaken Washington’s control over its proxy states, renders all the imperialists and settler-colonialists of the world less able to operate. The military powers and covert operations networks of the imperialist NATO alliance are concentrated in the United States. Israel’s settler-colonial project wouldn’t likely be able to survive for long without support from Washington, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t be able to continue its genocide against the Yemeni people without U.S. aid, and NATO would be rendered largely ineffectual if the U.S. were to leave it.

The U.S. has also long been the center for global capitalist economic power, meaning that if the U.S. or the countries that it economically depends upon are turned socialist, it will destroy the power balance which Michael Parenti describes in his book Dirty Truths: “A socialist Cuba or a socialist North Korea, as such, are not a threat to the survival of world capitalism. The danger is not socialism in any one country but a socialism that might spread to many countries. Multinational corporations, as their name implies, need the entire world, or a very large part of it, to exploit and to invest and expand in. There can be no such thing as ‘capitalism in one country.’”

If a socialist anti-colonial revolution were to happen in the U.S., the capitalist oligarchs would lose much of their wealth and most of their former economic leverage, even if they were to all successfully move their assets out of the country. The remaining capitalist powers would survive only through intense internal repression and militarism, and the collapse of their economic systems amid climate change and the decline of corporate profits would motivate their people to work towards revolution. Palestine would be decolonized amid the defeat of Israel. The collapse of Western economic dominance would leave all of the African and South American countries that have suffered under neo-colonialism freer to pursue their own destinies. The extinction of imperialism itself would be in sight, to be replaced by a paradigm where socialism dominates the globe.

Most immediately, such a revolution would rectify the injustice that’s led to all of the evils committed by U.S. imperialism: the colonization of the region’s indigenous lands and the creation of the United States of America. In this future, the land would collectively no longer be called the “United States,” nor “America.” It would predominantly take on the name that many indigenous people still use for it: Turtle Island.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744

America’s Class War Is Rapidly Escalating. We Must Act To Overthrow Capitalism

While the disastrous fallout within America from Covid-19 is thoroughly exposing the contradictions of capitalist society, it’s limiting our options as revolutionary agitators and encouraging complacency. Protesting in public is now unsafe and largely illegal, and the virus risks are making people too afraid to step out of line. If we don’t act, the following months will be perfect for the government to suspend civil liberties and for corporations to exploit the crisis.

This is why class conscious people need to unify around a concrete plan for taking action against the capitalist class. The current chaos is potentially a great opportunity for moving society towards socialist revolution, but we’ll first need directions.

For the next month or so: participate in the planned strikes

On April 1st begins the planned rent strike. If you’re not receiving income as a result of the lockdowns, you shouldn’t have to pay rent-even if America’s government tries to buy your complacency by sending you partial relief money. The same applies to how you should treat the other aspects of our economic system. This crisis has demonstrated that wealth is produced by the workers, and that our society’s ruling institutions are willing to leave behind those in the lower classes. We should respond by cutting off our support for the system, specifically for the landlords who continue to demand people support their illegitimate income gathering arrangement during this time of scarcity.

On April 2nd, a general strike is planned, one that like the rent strike has the following demands: universal healthcare, guaranteed sick leave and food stamps, free universal housing, deactivation of ICE, release of detainees, cancellation of student debt, a halt on parking enforcement, and suspension of mortgages, evictions, and rent. The store workers, who are instrumental in holding up the current economy, should be sure to participate in this strike. They and others should also take part in this year’s May 1st strike.

Further strikes should be organized in the coming months. But a strike isn’t how we’ll ultimately take power, and the demands I’ve mentioned above no doubt won’t all be met. We should use these events to galvanize the organizing power of the poor and working classes.

For the coming months: build the institutions for revolt

These strikes have such potential for furthering class struggle because if they’re big enough, they’ll show the ability of the masses to unite and defy our circumstances. The quarantines are leading to a joblessness crisis unlike anything the U.S. has ever seen, with unemployment filings skyrocketing and jobless rates estimated to soon potentially get to 30%. At the same time, banks and corporations are working to exploit the crisis at the expense of the economic victims. Taxpayers are again bailing out wealthy insiders. The hospitals that lower class people rely on are being overwhelmed due to America’s corporatist healthcare system. The big banks have called for more Wall Street deregulation, and for healthcare firms to raise prices on critical drugs. There’s even been a trend of insider trading among America’s oligarchic senators amid the collapse of the stock market.

Such exploitation and corruption, facilitated by a growing agenda among capitalist powers like the U.S. and the U.K. to push through repressive measures, embody the ways capitalism is disregarding the interests of the have-nots during this pandemic. Class antagonism is thus being exacerbated, not just on a political and economic level but on an interpersonal level. Hamptons residents are reporting how the people from the wealthy neighborhoods have been hoarding supplies and recklessly venturing into public, inflaming long-standing resentment from those who lack the resources to act so carelessly. We won’t be able to respond to these slights and injustices until we unify more of our class behind the organizations for socialist revolution.

I recommend that you join or attempt to join the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Workers World Party, the African People’s Socialist Party, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, or the Communist Party USA. There are also many local or smaller communist organizations throughout the country, such as the Pan-American People’s Liberation Party. If you’re persistent, you’ll become part of one or more of these parties (depending on whether what you join allows dual membership) And you’ll be able to get others to join these parties if you advocate online for people to do the same as you.

This is where the bulk of our organizing will be able to take place in the coming months, and where you’ll be able to join any organizations: through the Internet. We must concentrate the extra time we’ll be spending online into recruiting for revolutionary institutions, spreading information about the coming strikes, and educating people about the need for proletarian revolution. This way, we’ll build up the institutions that we’ll need for translating the growing class consciousness of the masses into a revolutionary force.

For the coming year and the years that follow: mobilize towards overthrowing the capitalist state

I don’t want to too explicitly advocate for the more drastic actions that I believe will be necessary for accomplishing our task, though many of these actions are mentioned throughout this article about the history of civil disobedience. But as Lenin wrote, “The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of ‘withering away.’” This describes our strategy for overcoming capitalist power as America’s revolutionary crisis intensifies.

After the current quarantine ends in the U.S., we should organize vast public protests against the egregious new capitalist abuses that will no doubt be happening at that point. We should also plan to put together road blockades, occupations of buildings, sit-ins, and more general strikes. We should do so while spreading the message that capitalism is broken and that socialist revolution is our only option, like has happened with France’s protests as Marxist imagery has been incorporated into the displays of the gilets jaunes.

The three pillars of our long-term strategy should be disrupting the system through these civil disobedience tactics, spreading class consciousness while building the revolutionary institutions, and getting the members of the proletarian revolutionary movement armed and trained. In the coming years, our movement will be met with violence from the state, the right-wing paramilitaries, and likely lone wolf attackers. We’ll succeed by keeping the movement’s participants physically safe, building the organizations that can help us be resilient amid state repression, and spreading awareness of what exactly a socialist revolution will entail.

By this, I mean spreading awareness that the U.S. is a settler-colonial state which exploits other colonized parts of the world, and that this reality is at the root of why we’re living in this broken capitalist system. To free ourselves from capitalism, we’ll need to carry out an anti-colonial revolution. One that works in solidarity with socialist states like China, Cuba, the DPRK, and Vietnam, which have long been under attack to various degrees by U.S. imperialism.

This crisis is making all of these things abundantly clear. China has all but defeated the virus due to its socialized healthcare system, Cuba hasonly a few dozen Covid-19 cases because of its socialized healthcare system and unique anti-viral medicine, Vietnam is handling it similarly, and the DPRK has barely been in contact with the virus so far. Chinaand Cuba in particular are taking the lead in sending medical assistance to other countries. At the same time, the United States is letting the virus explode among its citizens due to its neoliberal healthcare system, using sanctions to block medical resources from the people of Venezuela and Iran, and slipping into a depression in contrast to the relative economic resilience of the socialist nations.

It’s getting clearer to a lot of people that capitalism isn’t the system we need, and it’s clear to those who pay attention that socialism, specifically Marxism-Leninism, is the solution that can save society from the catastrophe we’re facing. If you’re a U.S. resident who’s committed to the cause of proletarian revolution, your job is to utilize the present conditions best you can towards developing the class struggle in your country.

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