Below is a talk I gave at Hunter College last semester (Spring 10) titled, Is A Revolution Possible in the U.S. Hope you enjoy!
When you look at today’s world, it isn’t hard to see that we need fundamental change in our society. If we take a look at the Gulf of Mexico, instead of seeing a blue sea, what you have is oil, due to the disastrous spill caused by BP’s blind hunger to pump out more of the black gold at all cost. Even if it means destroying our natural habitat and putting millions of working peoples livelihoods in danger. Or we can look at the state of Arizona, which recently passed a racist law criminalizing undocumented workers. The reason, to prevent more immigrants from “stealing jobs” and more importantly, to use immigrants as scapegoats and blame them for the state of the U.S.’s economy. As if immigrants ran Wall Street banks. Through out the U.S. and in fact the world, politicians have gone after workers living standards, firing public sector workers, making sure workers take huge pay cuts and cutting social services. The reason, according to them, is so that we can collectively share the burden of the Great Recession, as if we ever collectively shared the profit that has been made by capitalists. What all this has come to show is that these problems, whether it be the attack on working peoples living standards, the war in the middle east, the destruction of the environment, or the racist attacks on immigrants, Arabs and Muslims , all come back to the systematic problem of capitalism.
In the U.S., the rich have never been richer, and in fact are still making money as national economies go bankrupt. And the class-divide between workers and superrich continues to get starker and starker, both national and internationally. This past week a general strike in Greece paralyzed the country and brought the EU to its knees. Prompting, EU to pass a stimulus package. In Puerto Rico, students have also responded to attacks by occupying their schools. In the U.S., although we haven’t seen general strikes, the national demonstrations on March 4th against budgets cuts brought out a fresh new generation of students and workers, willing to stand up for their rights. What all these struggles show is that there are two antagonistic classes clashing together for different ways forward. For the capitalists, the solution to the global economic crisis is to make the workers pay, and to restore profit. For workers, is to do away with the for-profit system, and set-up a new system based on human need. Up to this point masses of workers aren’t at the White House yet, but what is important to understand is that the great recession has made clearer that there are two-sides to this battle, worker and capitalist. That is precisely the contradiction of capitalism. On one hand you have a tiny minority of people who decide what products are going to be made, how those products will be made, what wars are to be fought, what will be our living wage, and what conditions do we work in. On the other hand, you have the actual mass of workers that have no say whatsoever on how things should run, besides electing every couple of years capitalist A or capitalist B. The problem for capitalist is that workers control the flow of capitalism on the day-to-day level, and in practice proves that indeed capitalists aren’t even needed. And there lies the contradiction of capitalism. A contradiction, which can only be solved through a revolution, a socialist revolution. A revolution that would alter fundamentally the social, economic and political relationships in our society, and put working people in power, in the schools, communities and work places.
Now some people might argue that the idea of a revolution is too far-fetched, especially here in the belly of the beast. However, history would disagree. After all, this country was founded by two radical and bloody revolutions, one to overthrow British imperialism and the other to do away with slavery. And not as your high school history teacher would have seem, but these revolutions weren’t just due to the brilliance of Thomas Paine or Abraham Lincoln, but involved, like genuine revolutions, the masses of people. I say this, not to give you a boring history lesson, but to argue that revolutions are necessary products of historical circumstances, and do not occur based on ones good or bad choice, but instead occur because it is the only way forward both politically and economically. These revolutions were very much radical in their day, however the discussion today is about a socialist revolution, one that both changes the social and economic functioning’s in our society, and destroys the old system of capitalism. Once again the idea of a revolution and in particular a socialist revolution isn’t alien to workers in this country. A couple of examples, In 1919, dock workers and all workers in Seattle went on a general strike, one of their reasons were to be in solidarity with the socialist revolution in Russia of 1917. The American anti-war activist Eugene Debs, around the same time was jailed for speaking against World War 1, and from his jail cell, ran for president as a socialist. He received a million votes, the highest ever for a third party candidate. And all this was occurring after a period of red scare where any type of radical was vilified as unpatriotic. We can also take a look at the history of the 1930’s and the Great Depression, which was a decade of huge radical and working class rebellions which achieved tremendous gains for us, like worker’s right to unionized, the social security system, the welfare system etc. These working class upsurges had everything to do with ordinary people, many of them socialist or led by socialist, fighting for their basic rights to a fair living standard. And in the process of fighting for that, discovered the collective power they had as a class, to strike, shutdown production and on some instances to run the factories on their own.
The civil rights movement of the early 60’s and the radical movements that developed in the end of the decade is another testament to the rich tradition of working class people mobilizing and fighting for change. Some people might think that was then, and that this is now. However, the U.S. working class has a very explosive character to it. For example the mass radicalizations of the 1930’s, 1960’s and to some extent the openness to radical ideas today, were preceded by moments of rightwing dominance and working class defeats. Think of the red scare of the 1920’s also known as the roaring twenties for the super rich of this country. Where you had on one end capitalists making the largest profits ever seen till than, and on the other, you had working people increasingly struggling just to get by. The McCarthyist period of the 1950’s, saw one of the most conservative and racist period in the so-called greatest democracy in the world, with the witch hunt against radicals and the beginning of the civil rights movement that challenged Jim Crow south. The Bush era, similarly saw an intensification in the divide between working people and rich, and the racist attacks against Arabs, Muslims and immigrants. I say all of this because it is important to understand the contradictions that existed before the historical outbursts of struggles of the 30’s and 60’s. And this is, I think, one of the more important dynamics to understand about the class struggle in this country, it is both explosive, and should be seen as a part of the larger revolutionary process. Meaning that the struggles for reforms being fought in the here and now, and the defeats and the small victories, all form part of the collective class-consciousness of working people. And although it might not be evident at times, the working class and the capitalists are constantly in a class struggle, a struggle that in the last three decades the super rich have been winning. However, the important thing to understand is that capitalism forces these two classes to struggle, in its simplest terms higher profits equal lower wages for us, tax cuts for the rich, mean higher taxes for us, and so on. And taking a closer look at it, its not that we have an affixation with struggling against capitalists, however the conditions created in this society forces us to do so. As long as capitalism fails to delivery in economic and social needs, workers will struggle for it. As Karl Marx put it, the driving force of history has been the clash of classes, and in the case of capitalism, worker vs. capitalists.
But then how do you explain why struggle has been so low in the U.S. as compared to lets say France or Greece? Where is the class struggle and the revolution here? The reason why is because working class people have little to no representation at all for their interest. Due to the assault on unions, workers here have been stripped of the most basic elementary form of fighting for their rights. And, do to the two-party system of the Democrats and Republicans; working class people do not have the voice of a third-party, which exists in other countries. All this means that it makes it much difficult to actually struggle against attacks we face as working people, if we don’t have unions that bring us together, or a working class party that can challenge the everyday politics of Washington. And it also means that it can be hard to say where working class radicalism is at, since we don’t see millions of people out on the streets. However, these conditions mean that working class radicalism occurs on a subterranean level, and that when circumstances deem it fit, can cause a massive wave of activism and renewed sense of fight back. The most recent example of this was in the spring of 2006, when millions of immigrant workers walked out of their jobs and took to the streets demanding full legalization, and reigniting the celebration of the historically working class holiday May 1st. Once again, this outburst of struggle didn’t just come out of nowhere. If we take a look at the 1990’s which saw one of the largest increases of migration to the U.S., mostly due to the U.S. free trade policies with Mexico which destroyed their national agriculture system and left many Mexican farmers heading north for jobs. The 1990’s also saw many immigrants becoming much more integrated to the American workforce, joining unions and becoming much more involved in there community. So when the racist Sensenbrenner bill in 2006 was proposed, the immigrant community responded by taking over the streets of every major city. However, what happened to this movement is very telling of the process of class struggle in this country. Because of the relative weakness of the radical left and radical ideas, the militant movement for immigrant’s rights which was out in the streets and forced the debate of immigration onto the national spotlight was instead channeled into the Democratic Party’s get out to vote for 2008. And in turn two years later we are stuck at square one, fighting another racist anti-immigrant legislation. A movement that in its very character expressed the class anger that exists in our society, but nonetheless the movement was disarmed by the Democratic Party and those who argued that protesting wouldn’t get us anywhere. But just cause people struggle doesn’t mean we will win or that we will choose the most effective strategy to do so. Many people feel voting for democrats every year, or just by signing online petitions is enough. And even the most effective and collective strategy for class struggle, the strike weapon, isn’t a guarantee to success, just think about the MTA strike in 2005. But what’s important to understand is that, yes class struggle is inevitable, but whether our side wins or loses has everything to do with what kind of strategy we use, how we implement it, and what our goals are.
Taking look at the world around us today, the election of the first African American president has raised a new sense of hope and higher expectations that the political establishment will follow through on its promises of change. Obama’s election was a rejection of the status-quo and it reinvigorated millions of people to join his political campaign and engage in politics in general. Although Obama’s election expressed the mass desire for change in this country, it has also shown that the vehicle for change isn’t based on whose in the White House, but as always been the case, based on whose protesting outside of the white house, and in the streets. Many people are realizing this including workers who have seen their wages reduced, teachers who are seeing the pink slip this fall, and ordinary people who have seen social services cut. And what they have seen is Obama play the role of moderate and doing nothing but offer more cuts and giving more of our money to the Wall Street bankers. However, people are not drawing pessimistic conclusions, but are instead becoming much more politically involved and realizing that it will take ordinary peoples involvement in the day-to-day struggles that can actually bring change. All this being said, the majority of Americans have not reached the conclusion that capitalism has to be overthrown, nor do we have a significant number of people in the population who consider themselves revolutionaries, as was the case in the 1960’s. But the point to understand is that capitalism has an inherent inability to satisfy the needs of the working majority, and workers are continuously forced to fight back in order to defend there living standards. It is under these conditions, and these struggles for reforms, that working class people become political, become confident that they can win bigger reforms, and ultimately begin to develop revolutionary conclusions once they realize through there struggles that capitalism ultimately is a flawed system that cannot be tweaked or reformed. The German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg summed it up best when she said: : “The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to socialists the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal--the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labor.”
Knowing what we know, capitalism inability to satisfy our needs, the ever-increasing tension between the have and the have-nots, and that class struggle is inevitable, it is important that we prepare ourselves for when the mass of working people begin to radicalize and reach revolutionary conclusions. The opportunity for building a revolutionary movement exists in the U.S. today, even though a full fledge revolution isn’t on the table. But we need to keep our eyes on the goal, and understand that the struggles we fight for today are the stepping stones to a revolution. In struggle, people’s ideas change rapidly. Millions of people who only yesterday fought for reforms, have the ability when circumstances deem it fit to leap forward and focus there attention on the transformation of our society. A transformation that will not be lead by a smart elite or by specialized armed guerrilla leaders, but by the masses of working people. One of the main leaders of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, had this to say about what a revolution looks like:
The most dubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events. In ordinary times, the state--be it monarchical or democratic--elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business--kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists.
But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime...The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.
And it’s for that historical task that we want to begin to lay the foundations. Not only is a revolution possible in the U.S. but it is absolutely necessary and urgently needed to put an end to poverty, war and oppression, and in its place a society where justice, real freedom, and human need is the order of the day.
France is once again at the center stage of class struggle in Europe. Sarkozy is implementing a “reform” to the pension system, which would allow retired workers to collect their pension at 62, as opposed to 60, and collect full benefits at 67, as opposed to 65. This is a direct attack on the living standards of French workers and is part of a strategy to strengthen neoliberalism all across Europe, and in the world really. Talk of “fiscal consolidation”, “debt reconsolidation” and of “shared sacrifices” has surfaced in Europe, in particular in recent months in Britain and in Greece. The same could be said here in the U.S. as politicians are beginning to start an offensive on the Social Security System and candidate for N.Y. Governor Andrew Cuomo has promised to slash wages and state jobs. The ideas behind these attacks are to make working class people pay for the Great Recession caused by the bankers and the rich. These aggressive attacks are a neoliberal solution to the crisis, i.e. privatization, cuts on social spending, and a general attack on workers living standards. Throughout the world, the talk has been between a double dip recession and the quagmire of the first. IMF reports that in the U.S. 7.5 million people since 2007 have been added to the unemployment roll. Furthermore, they report, “over 210 million people across the globe are estimated to be unemployed at the moment, an increase of more than 30 million since 2007. Three quarters of the increase in the number of unemployed people has occurred in the advanced economies and the remainder among emerging market economies.” Capitalism stills finds itself in a crisis of overproduction and has no sign of emerging out of its slump unless it is in the back of workers. 
