If you’re a poor or working class person, now isn’t the time to let the distractions of daily life shift your focus away from class struggle. Now is the time to become more active in the struggle than ever, because if we don’t do anything to resist capitalism, capitalism will drag us further into hardship amid neoliberal deterioration and economic collapse. In less than a couple of weeks, when August arrives and the special Covid-19 unemployment checks stop coming, the economy is going to enter into an even worse downturn. It will keep getting worse from there.
Those who will be worse off because of this need to take action. Here’s a guide to what we can do to help take the territory now called the “United States” closer towards a proletarian revolution, which is the only outcome where the capitalist class will lose their ability to dictate the affairs of the masses.
In immediate terms: participate in and organize general strikes
The next general strike, which is focused around the Black Lives Matter movement, will be on the 20th. Some of its demands are explained by the website Seyfarth as follows:
Justice for Black communities, with an unequivocal declaration that Black Lives Matter, is a necessary first step to winning justice for all workers. To win higher wages, better jobs, and Unions for All, we must ensure that Black workers can build economic power. To win Healthcare for All, we must address disparities in accessibility and quality of care. Action on climate change must center communities of color. Immigrant communities stand in solidarity with Black workers to build power together. Education, housing, and criminal justice reform must start by listening to Black workers and leaders. We will support and align with Black-led organizations and their demands.
All the future strikes, such as the one which will be held on this year’s Labor Day in September, need to be promoted and participated in. But we can’t do this with the belief that they’ll make all of our demands met, or that capitalism will be defeated if the strikes are unexpectedly successful.
When the capitalist state is in power, and the actions of the government are always decided by what the capitalist class rather than the working class wants, strikes best serve the purpose of galvanizing the effort to overthrow the existing state. If we come to the government with demands for justice, and these demands aren’t met (as is the case the vast majority of times), it’s far from pointless. Because a great contradiction in capitalism has been exposed.
This is the contradiction that Stalin described in The Foundations of Leninism as:
The contradiction between labour and capital. Imperialism is the omnipotence of the monopolist trusts and syndicates, of the banks and the financial oligarchy, in the industrial countries. In the fight against this omnipotence, the customary methods of the working class-trade unions and cooperatives, parliamentary parties and the parliamentary struggle-have proved to be totally inadequate. Either place yourself at the mercy of capital, eke out a wretched existence as of old and sink lower and lower, or adopt a new weapon-this is the alternative imperialism puts before the vast masses of the proletariat. Imperialism brings the working class to revolution.
In terms of the next few years: build revolutionary institutions
Without a vanguard, the anger of the masses will be impotent. The problem with calling the protests of the last month or so a “revolution” is that they aren’t unified under a revolutionary program, one that’s facilitated by an organizational structure whose goal is to overthrow the capitalist state and replace it with a proletarian democracy.
Two of the largest organizations in the U.S. that align with this goal are the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. It’s also important to build organizations like the African People’s Socialist Party, which may not be explicitly Marxist-Leninist but provides an emphasis on anti-colonialism. On this continent where colonialism and capitalism are deeply linked, lending support to these types of anti-colonial organizations (which white people in particular can do by joining the Uhuru solidarity movement) is essential for any socialist to do.
In this situation where the country’s communist and anti-colonial movements are still struggling for large influence, no one organization can currently claim to be the vanguard. The vanguard will have to form through growing the series of organizations that are best suited to take on a role of revolutionary leadership. Their job will be to implement the abolition of the United States, the return of land to the indigenous First Nations, and the establishment of socialism within these nations.
For now though, their ability to help with the overthrow of the capitalist state is limited; they’ve been unwilling or unable to form an equivalent of the Red Army, which was crucial for defeating the counter-revolutionary forces in Russia and establishing the USSR. As individuals and smaller local groups, we need to work towards solving this problem.
Prepare to defend from the violence of the capitalist state and its paramilitaries
This week in Portland, Oregon, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security sent officers to protests and had them use Gestapo-like tactics to detain people, driving around in unmarked vehicles and covering people’s faces without explanation. The capitalist state’s crackdown is becoming more and more extreme, and for a good reason: the state’s very survival is coming under threat amid an increasing potential for civil war.
A recent paper from two sociology experts, one of whom predicted this year’s social unrest, says that the U.S. is “headed for another civil war.” The factors behind why this prediction is now reasonable all relate to capitalist collapse; inequality has risen to a potentially unprecedented level after over a generation of neoliberal attacks against the working class, and now the proletariat-especially the colonized proletariat-are fighting back. But the state will use any means necessary to make this stop from resulting in a proletarian revolution.
This fear is reflected by law enforcement’s special desire to counter “anarchist extremists,” showing the state is alarmed by the situation of rising political radicalism. They’ll react even more strongly to a communist-dominated movement, since communists have long been established as America’s #1 enemy. As the masses continue to radicalize, the state’s reaction will grow more detached from civil liberties and more violent. If the revolutionaries aren’t sufficiently armed and ready to defend from this domestic military invasion, they won’t be able to create more autonomous zones like the one in Seattle-much less win large amounts of territory from Washington.
To begin the process of gaining land from the U.S., we’ll need to carry out occupations of land that are far bigger than the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone was. This will require far more protection than the series of armed individuals who guarded the entrances of the zone.
It will require a force big enough to permanently keep the U.S. army and other counter-revolutionary forces from taking back the land that the revolutionaries have taken. And this giant version of CHAZ will have to be under the control of a vanguard, rather than a leadership that’s infected with liberalism and is willing to surrender to the counter-revolutionaries. CHAZ was dismantled because it had this problem. We can’t make the same mistake.
So while you do the other things I’ve discussed, prepare yourself for a scenario where you’ll be having to defend yourself, your comrades, and oppressed people from the fascistic forces of the U.S. At this point, it’s an entirely reasonable thing to expect.
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