The Proletarian Situation As U.S. Imperialism Declines (Part 2)
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Imperialism and the Irrationalism of Different Wings of the Ruling Class
The Democrats see themselves as the last defenders of the ‘Age of Reason’ against the irrationalism of the reactionaries. We will show how the fight for an ‘Age of Reason’ can only be based in the class struggle. Like Lukacs we understand even the democratic bourgeoisie is defending the basic irrationalism of imperialism against social progress the moment it is mass, i.e. social. The message of the supporters of the Democrats in the workers’ movement is that workers do not have to liberate themselves, rather they should rely on the state and eschew the building of political independent class struggle organizations.
George Lukacs critiqued this reactionary dynamic in his study The Destruction of Reason:
“…the content, form, method, tone, etc., of its [Capital’s,ed.] reaction to progress in society are dictated not by an intrinsic, inner dialectic of this kind, but rather by the adversary, by the fighting conditions imposed on the reactionary bourgeoisie. This must be borne in mind as the basic principle of the development of irrationalism.” (1953, pg. 10)
We see that scribes and mouthpieces on Capitals’ payrolls are all agreed that class warfare must not be even identified in the living conditions of the masses, and failing to suppress its mention it’s their job to discourage organizing a workers’ counteroffensive imposing fighting on the bourgeoisie!
Sustaining and advancing the forces of production to new heights demands socialist planning. It is necessary to end the anarchy of production, the cycles of collapse and the production for profit, the production for destruction both by fossil fuel dependency and militarism, and Capitals Ultimate reliance upon the military industrial complex. The working class is being deluded by misleaders’ claims that labor can attain a strategic high ground from which social and economic gains can be won by maintaining a subservient alliance with the capitalist Democrats.
We say the Democrats are the graveyard of progressive social movements! They moved might and main to control and disable Black Lives Matter’s mass actions and turned its base toward the Biden campaign. From the start they planned to steer “Me Too” away from collision with Trumpism and its fascist supporters. From the moment Trump was elected, and after the huge 1/21/2017 mobilization, the Democratic party did their best to bury the mass movement in judicial attacks on sexists in their own milieu, their congressional and elective ranks! No surprise, instances of sexual assault and rape skyrocketed during Trump’s term in office.
Rightism has been gaming the “3 Branches” of government since the 1960s in pursuit of a parliamentary road to fascism. This road is the cheap, legalized road, without recourse to a national police army of millions of paid goons. Rightism is today more successful than at any time in the last 70 years, as they now have control of the Supreme Court. But just at this juncture they have a problem. Women want their right to abortion back, a right the Supreme Court took away in 2022.
The ostensible opposition to rightism, Biden’s Democratic Party, with it all the official reformist outfits like NOW, the DSA and the legalism fetishists on NGO payrolls, all say they will get this right back. But they have done nothing of consequence. They do nothing because the Democrats can’t rule if the objective connection between women’s oppression and the capitalists’ rule becomes explicit, becomes subjective. And the Democrats cannot acknowledge that the bosses, the “two party” donor class, are waging a war on women, exactly in defense of the capitalist mode of production!
They can’t rule if they can’t maintain their electoral partnership with the “other” bourgeois monopoly party and keep their political monopoly-classless society fiction accepted as fact. Proving themselves worthy enforcers for the capitalist class, Democrats have succeeded in demobilizing the Women’s “Me Too” movement; there have been no mass women’s movement mobilizations in the Biden years, just as the Obama mythologizers demobilized Black Lives Matter.
Irrationalism and fascism are permanent features of imperialism and in particular now during capitalism’s terminal crisis. MAGA and its fascist vanguard layers will not be defeated by the Democrats or the Department of Justice (DOJ) no matter how many fascist leaders are locked up. To stop the fascist threat, mass labor organizations must mobilize to defeat it, to crush it in the egg!
Scapegoating for Deflection, Capitalism Moves the Masses’ Anger Target to the “Deep State.”
A delusional means of escape from a historical materialist understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist state is a conjurer’s mythological “Deep State” composed of the bureau of “THEY.” When pressed, “THEY” are often identified as a cabal of ‘liberal elite Marxists.’ Thus the Administrative State, the lexicon of regulatory agencies, are demagogically portrayed as the real rulers, and of whom Biden is a creature and personification of anti-christian evil. When adherents of this rubbish are in Congress and making daily headlines to the cheers of Fox, Forbes and Trump, the winners are recruiters for fascist gangs. Flipside delusional escapism from facing the real-existing class enemy is the widely held pacifist view that progressives can straighten crazed rightists out by debate, by sheer power of thought. Even Hillary Clinton backhandedly confessed that this won’t work when she said the Trump base may need to be “deprogrammed(!)” This gets laughs on the lecture circuit, but the nuts have automatic weapons and dream out loud about civil war.
Fascism is an existential threat to working class self-organization. Because its precursor thought is present and defended in all imperialist political thought, we must defeat the entire imperialist capitalist state which labor can do only by establishing a fighting workers labor party, a combat party of the working class and the oppressed, which fights for a revolutionary socialist program. Such a revolutionary combat party builds the organizations of dual power, factory committees, inter-district and inter-union committees, popular assemblies and workers councils where the legislative and executive decisions of the class are made democratically, leading to political power and the establishment of a workers government.
Shell games, bourgeois norms, electoralism and conmen: Workers aren’t buying it!
The bourgeoisie can no longer rule in the old way. Dementia at the highest levels of the Senate is an apt metaphor for the decay of U.S. imperialist hegemony. The self deluded bourgeois democrats and apologists for capitalism’s ‘excesses’ chase respectability like a dog chases its tail. The old kind of elections require two teams that agree to the rules of peaceful transition. They don’t have this. The Democrats have an old candidate the youth don’t relate to at all. Millions sit out the elections. The 2016 participation rate was only 55.7% the lowest since 1996. That was before the voters saw Trump’s authoritarian affinity to the fascists, his billionaire friendly tax cuts, his war on immigrants and poor culminating in his failures during COVID, which all boosted the 2020 turnout to 66.9%. Facing the 2024 elections, to compensate for the tight electoral margin, they play up Bidenomics, the meatgrinder of a war in Ukraine as a humanitarian obligation and perpetual deficit spending until the ultra-leveraged zombie economy unravels.
The old school Republicans are captives of the MAGA rightists. Trump’s base, at 34% of the population controls the Republican Party and 26 of the 50 state legislatures. Trump and MAGA love that they still dominate the media stream, can obstruct government functioning and enthusiastically claim they “owned the libs.” Like the con man P.T. Barnum, Trump knows there is a ‘sucker born every minute’ and that there is no bad press, just free publicity. The ideological patriarchal white supremists love his innuendo, his bravado, his attack dog style, and his world of alt-facts; And his misogyny. Objective reality matters little to them and the old ways, which kept senators and congressmen from slipping each other the shiv in the Senate’s sauna are eroded. Cheering “Hang Mike Pence” the January 6th insurrectionists brought the shiv to the sauna!
Thus the political class’s top dollar suits are no guarantee their claims to represent a future we can survive are credible. Workers need the credible. In production, wishes don’t count. Something different altogether is many workers’ wish; better than wishing would be their own class-political independent party explicitly fighting for socialism, supporting every struggle of the workers and oppressed against the bosses and their state. That would be the respectable way to face the future, except we don’t have this class struggle party yet, never mind the parliamentary suits!
All media respectability and nearly all social approval in the U.S. requires support for the capitalist parties, their international projects and their mode of production. Media performance power has determined the voting poll totals of elections since 1960, when John Kennedy was seen as the glamorous not-Nixon. Biden ticked the box, at least, of not being Trump. That was enough for the simple majority to elect him. And so in 2020, playing by these rules you would not have guessed that historically the Democrats’ record is the party of foreign wars.
You may not notice war but war notices you!
Revolutionary workers observe the commonality among those who advocate no independent role for the working class in the Russia/NATO proxy war over Ukraine, while abandoning the fight for working class political independence at home. Two camps of social imperialists face off defending their favored imperialist overlords. The Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Committee and their ilk wants the U.S. to arm Ukraine. You will not find a single serious call from them to close U.S. foreign military bases, to abolish NATO or to hot cargo military goods to independent anti-fascist workers [militia] in Ukraine or for any independent role for workers of the world in this war. Groups in an opposing ‘peace camp’ include capitalist ‘anti-globalists’, ‘pacifists’, ‘sustainable development theorists’ (Sachs/Escobar), and some, but not all ‘tankies,’ and promoters of red/brown candidates.
The conspiracist ‘centrist’ capitalists run Kennedy and the ultra right MAGA run Trump as the voice of peace with Russia. The self identified socialists in this camp legitimize Putin’s invasion by citing NATO expansion as justification. Revolutionary workers long opposed US/NATO expansion as an aggressive trip line, but crossing it was imperialist Russia’s choice. What imperialist Russia identifies as an existential threat are just more capitalist bosses’ national borders where workers are concerned! To cover their treachery, the Putin apologists on the left hide behind half of the Liebknecht message “Our main enemy is at home” to justify that they do not call for an independent role for the working class either in the western imperialist centers, Ukraine or in imperialist Russia. They become national-socialists with no internationalist program when they write out of history the rest of Liebknecht’s statement,
“The main enemy of the German people is in Germany: the German imperialists, the parties of war, German secret diplomacy. This enemy at home must be fought by the German people in a political struggle, cooperating with the proletariat of other countries whose struggle is against their own imperialists.” (our bold, ed)
Revolutionary socialists fight for an independent role for the workers of the world in the unfolding inter-imperialist conflict. Our fight for dual defeatism turns the guns around on the instigators from Kiev to Brussels to Washington and to Moscow and Beijing! Against the competing twin campists who are hawking Biden, West or whoever the tankie PSL floats, we call for the unions and organizations of the oppressed to hold assemblies of workers delegates to put up workers candidates on the working class’s historic program.
The natural dialectician in the back of the worker’s mind knows some connection exists between the post-COVID 17% inflation, the beating war drums and cheering for a Zelensky regime they have no stake in. In early September Secretary of State Blinken announced another billion dollars was earmarked for Ukraine, the total now running above $44B for military aid alone, mostly channeled from the treasury straight to the war industries. By early October Congress averted (until mid November) a government funding shutdown by removing Ukraine spending from the resolution. This highlights waning support from the public for the proxy war. The generalized exasperation of an underserved populace was to be expected as the war drags on and every day workers are navigating urban decay, homelessness, opioid epidemics, and inflation compounded by near daily disasters from mass shootings to fires like Maui and floods in New York. To the average worker the Democrats’ party line sounds like, “Billions for war bupkis for the people!” and the rabid right ‘anti-globalist’ ‘peace advocates’ can make hay with this all day long!
Meanwhile, a relative uptick in successful union organizing and a rise in strike activity has been an elemental result of the inflated cost of living, but this upsurge has not resulted in removing reformist misleaders and labor fakers whose game is selling defeats at the bargaining tables as wins. Throughout the labor federations labor fakers’ principal activity at meetings is salesmanship for Biden and excusing his imperialist projects where and when these are discussed and not ruled “out of order.”
The increasing violence and frequency of the collisions of the U.S.-led and China-led imperialist blocs are now reshaping the whole world market, but relatively few know this here, apart from the reportage on the “front lines” in the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. We denounced this war as a proxy war of U.S. imperialism and as an inter-imperialist war with the China/Russia imperialist bloc and an unjustifiable Russian invasion of Ukraine. We did this on 2/24/22, the first day, calling for Russia to get out, and on the following day we denounced this war on the floor of the Painters’ L.U. 18 meeting in NY, N.Y., re-endorsing the dual-defeatist position of Karl Liebknecht and launching our call for a New Zimmerwald. This got no attention elsewhere, apart from bureaucrat consternation, but a photocopy is in the L.U. 18 meeting minutes.
We have advocated for a dual-defeatist New Zimmerwald across the U.S. despite the hostility of virtually the entire left, which we see divided between pro-Russia and pro U.S. USELESS Social-imperialist camps! In fact we are relatively isolated for recognizing Russian and Chinese imperialism, while many leftists and all the Robertsonist (ICL, IG, IBT, BT) tendencies even deny capitalist restoration in China. This means many ostensible Trotskyists deny the theory of Permanent Revolution, either implicitly or explicitly claiming the bourgeois Zelensky state can deliver Ukrainian national liberation and need only refuse to pay their debt to the NATO countries after the war. This is Menshevism, and it is as helpless to impede the slide of the imperialists toward world war as Stalinism and Social Democracy were in the 1930s.
At the same time the pro-Moscow and pro-China camp see a Russian victory as “progressive,” some because it enhances the various ‘win-win’ and BRICS+ projects of the Chinese hybrid socialism (so-called) or ‘deformed workers state,’ while for others it means a semi-colonial bloc’s defeating U.S. imperialism, Ukrainian and all of western fascism. To revolutionary workers in many parts of the world such politics must look like comic book Marxism.
Misleaders and Reformists
Blocking the working class from even setting the stage for the taking of power today is a vast and varied array of centrist and reformist leaderships of the unions and social movements. They promote the team concept (labor/management unity), bring back tentative agreements and contracts which lag behind inflation and usurp the workers power by shutting down class struggle, enforcing class peace and social patriotism. While talking up liberation, democracy and economic justice, they do everything possible to prevent working class political independence -their becoming a class for itself- which fights with class struggle methods for a workers’ government to expropriate the commanding heights of the economy and run them under workers control. That is, they use the language of the workers and progressive movements to trap the workers within the parameters of what economism and reformism deem ‘realistically possible’ since the mythological ‘End of History’ put an end to class struggle and the socialist project. Reformism under the guise of democratic socialism, national liberation, national self-determination, dominates the workers movement and organizations of the oppressed.
Across the spectrum the workers and ‘progressive’ movements’ leaderships misdirect the workers into one capitalist or imperialist camp or the other. In their holiday speechifying the misleaders lament all the social evils every worker suffers: from homelessness, and police brutality, to under-employment, the gig economy, low wage-dead-end jobs and debt slavery to the banks and loan sharks. They easily identify climate catastrophe, the hot and cold wars on every continent threatening WWIII resetting the doomsday clock to 90 seconds, the list is replete with tragedy and suffering. A slow moving apocalypse moving in real time, quantitative destruction deepens qualitatively each and every moment the capitalists waste burning fossil fuels and creating wars. But the thing they dread and never will acknowledge is the need for a New Zimmerwald to unite workers everywhere against inter- imperialist war. That is, to unite around a revolutionary pole.
For a revolutionary pole to be established the varied social patriots and social imperialists must be exposed so the workers can build a new class struggle leadership that advances their class independent program in all things political including elections and war. To do so all class enemy serving theories, actions and advocacies must be ‘deconstructed’ to show which social class they act on behalf of as they project their worldview into the mass movement. This is the big objective of all our interventions in what for us, as a tiny proletarian tendency, must be a propaganda period, a preparatory period.
“Workers need their own revolutionary party to defeat the two imperialist blocs, the masters of the popular front’s “democratic stage,” the principal obstacle to socialism!!!”
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