CAPITALIST CRISIS, COVID AND ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE WILL ESCALATE DESPITE BIDEN VICTORY!
Workers must build the United Front against capitalist austerity & for the political independence of the working class: workers and the oppressed need an anti-capitalist, class struggle Workers Party NOW!
Build multi racial unemployed leagues! Build anti-eviction action committees! Housing is a right! Ban apartment warehousing and build quality affordable housing!
Health care is a right! Free Socialized Medicine for All!
Build Labor, Black, Brown Self-Defense Guards and Mass Union Mobilizations to Sweep the Racist Cops and Fascists from the Streets! For Class Struggle Union Caucuses in Our Unions! Kick the cops OUT of our Labor federations! Abolish the Police, the modern slave patrols!
Wages and full benefits for all during pandemic shutdowns! Fight for living wage jobs for all through a reduction of the workweek with no loss in pay! Jobs For All with a massive international program of public works of environmental remediation!
Open the economy safely under workers control following the scientific guidance of nurses, doctors and infection control experts! Hire thousands environmental health and safety professionals to rebuild OSHA, Public Health and the EPA!
Food security is a right! Farm to table unite independent truck farmers, the workers and unemployed. Feed the people! Cheap credit for small farms and small businesses! No more empty shelves or hunger because the for-profit delivery chain is insecure.
Bring the troops home, close imperialist military bases, dismantle the pentagon and national ‘intelligence’ surveillance networks open the books of national secrecy! Free the whistle blowers!
“It (ed. a Labor Party) can become a reformist party – it depends upon the development. Here comes in the question of program. I mentioned yesterday and I will underline it today – we must have a program of transitional demands, the most complete of them is a workers’ and farmers’ government. We are for a party, for an independent party of the toiling masses who will take power in the state. We must concretize it – we are for the creation of factory committees, for workers’ control of industry through the factory committees. All these questions are now pending in the air. They speak of technocracy [19], and put forward the slogan of “production for use.” We oppose this charlatan formula and advance the workers’ control of production through the factory committees.” – Leon Trotsky, “On the Labor Party Question in the United States“
The Vote Biden! ‘socialists’ have little guidance to offer the working class. Their tactic, to vote for Biden was supposedly to give the working class more breathing room to organize. That tactic has not borne much fruit. Indeed, now that he is elected, and the masses are quietly waiting, they are also obliged to ‘give him a chance.’ How else can they convince those they escorted to the polls that the Democrats cannot deliver on the promises of the election because they are committed capitalists. These leftists are chasing their tails with nothing to do until the Georgia election determines the balance in the Senate. After the Senate races in January all they will offer is a plan for taking the Senate and expanding the ‘squad’ in 2022. Without that Senate the Democrats will have their excuse for failures and those whom the left had hoped to convince will not have experienced all the avenues ‘democracy has to offer’ and will not be ready to break from the Democrats.This is the trap of American pragmatism applied by generations of Social-Democrats and Reformist Stalinists in the USA. The Praxis of the radical ‘socialist’ voters has no other outcome than year over year participation in the elections on the side of the “progressive” bourgeoisie (!). In 2020, they have abandoned the obstacle of the Marxist principle of no support to capitalist parties or candidates, paving the way for future capitulations and opportunism. How will they emerge from the 2020 elections as the champions of working class political independence, class struggle in the workplaces and on the streets and for the Workers Party based in the unions.They won’t. So goes the DSA, the CPUSA, LRP, the RCP et. al. infinitum.
We hold ‘nose-holding’ voters’ feet to the fire. We say now more than ever is the time to fight in the unions and organizations of the oppressed to Break From The Democrats and build a Fighting Workers Labor Party based in the unions.The failures of the 1990’s Labor Party Advocates to run candidates on the workers program set the struggle for independent workers politics and class consciousness back decades. We need to start over and go further! Build the fighting base in the unions based on the coming class struggle, in particular the nurses, teachers, communications, longshore and public workers!
The roadblock in the unions today is the entrenched leadership tied ten thousand ways to the Democratic Party machine. The party hacks in the union leadership hold back the militancy of the membership and pacify class struggle intent into labor peace, that “we are all in this together.” While workers take furloughs, pay cuts and unemployment, stock holders celebrate new highs in the market. Every working and poor person knows we have nothing in common with plutocrats and their police servants. Abolish the police! They are not workers but uniformed goons for Capital and do not belong in our labor federations. Biden/Harris will hire more police INSTEAD of the relief from repression and racist murder the masses yearn for.
Neither are we beneficiaries of their international military adventures. We remember each of the rationales for these and we remember the victims too, none of whom were bluebloods either. We don’t need any border wall or any cages for kids and we don’t need the mass deportation policy of Obama & Biden that preceded it, nor a retooling of it in any form! The major reason for floods of Central American refugees at our doorstep is the comprador regimes the U.S. supports in their countries! Bring the troops home! Abolish the immigration quotas and abolish ICE! Organize enlisted ranks unions! Bring back all the deported veterans who wish to come!
To do this we need militant caucuses in the unions that raise class struggle methods and class independent demands. We need to counter the decades-long class collaboration with the Democrats which has locked the working class out from advancing its own historic class interests over those of the financiers of the DNC. An unholy alliance with the interests of Wall Street and the ideology of American exceptionalism and patriotic chauvinism combine against workers’ interests as often as the sun rises. Does Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan-Chase, go to jail? His leadership has been convicted in federal court 6 times for masses of financial felonies. The biggest banks are only kept afloat now by infusions of trillions in free money by the Federal Reserve, and were already for six months before COVID hit.
Biden will come to power just as the jobs crunch hits and the economic crisis reasserts itself, triggered in part by the second wave of the COVID pandemic. The Biden response may be more scientific and rational but it will have its economic costs which will be borne by extended austerity on the back of the working class, the oppressed and failing small businesses. Meanwhile he will call governors together to try to get mask mandates, which will not prevail over COVID since they will not be enforced or even exist in all 50 states.
The schools and workplaces are HOTSPOTS today. The cavalier attitude of the politicians, administrators and bosses have put workers in harm’s way spreading the pandemic under the drumbeat of “Opening Up the Economy”. Learning nothing from the 1918 flu under Trump and with the complicity of Democratic governors and mayors we were walked right into the second wave. Even while new lockdowns are enforced, teachers are required to attend classes in Alaska. The ideology of individualism is promoted alongside obscurantist conspiracy theories and mocking of science and public health measures. The press has mostly been enlisted in publicizing these ideas only moments after dropping “herd immunity” as a real thing.
The vaccines the two party administrations hype and big pharma whip up offer an insufficient and no more comprehensive approach. National and international supply is questionable as soon as the likely exposed populations are epidemiologically traced. They are not planning to make anything like the required number of doses, and this doesn’t even begin to answer the question of effectiveness. The hopes of the masses have been raised in a vaccine that will get an “emergency approval,” and this does little to combat the ignorance and malignancy of the “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-masker” millions among us. Meanwhile refrigerated morgue trucks line up in Texas and mass graves are just around the corner.
The capitalist regime’s answer does not address hospital costs either. Families are getting enormous bills insurance does not cover for services rendered regardless of outcome. Already we see hospitals forcing pay cuts on nurses and staff. Biden did say the vaccines would be free at one point, but we haven’t heard any of that for a while and you won’t without mass union pressure, something the present union leadership will not bring. Likewise, Biden will surround himself with the kind of experts who will not acknowledge, much less fight, the causes of species-jumping illnesses. Our own party will need our own experts. We’ve seen theirs and look where they got us!
It is unlikely that Biden will convert factories to produce hundreds of millions of N95s (the only mask that effectively stops penetration or escape of the airborne virus). Hundreds of millions of these masks are needed because they start to fail after being put on and off five times. Today the healthcare workers are still required to reuse the N95 respirators more than five times per shift. A workers government and socialist planning would have fixed this production problem on day one. We are OUTRAGED that infected asymptomatic hospital workers are forced to keep working or be fired! The governors behind these orders are the same ones who won’t mandate wearing masks! Hospital bills you can’t pay, alive or dead, will trash your credit no matter what Bernie or Trump say about dodging them.
The Trade Union movement, which still represents millions of workers, was mobilized in the Democratic Party coalition to get out the vote for Biden. There was a bit of a stir around the calls for a general strike if the Trump ballot disruptions gained significant traction. That seems (at the moment) to have been defused by the incompetence of their MAGA leadership. Frankly, if Trump were an actual Mussolini-not just a poser-we would have seen the gun wielding mobs shut down the vote count. But for all their flag waving and forays into violent confrontations at BLM rallies, the fascist army has not been consolidated. In particular because capitalism does not need them to suppress the working class. The illusions in the Democratic party and the state are strong enough at present to forestall any socialist threat. Especially while the self proclaimed socialists are voting for them and telling workers to vote for them, as pipsqueak echoes of sellout labor tops! So much for fighting the Labor Management Cooperation Institute and production team concept for labor peace.
Trump looks demoralized and beaten and the street mobs are actually the Budweiser base. Loaded up on false bravado and beer the Trumpian thugs can only carry on so long without their racist dog whistle from the top. Not that they are no longer a threat to the workers movement; they have tens of thousands of organized thugs and Don Jr. is calling for “total war.” A prospect which is not on the Republican party agenda after Trump. These thugs will have to crawl back under their rock and stand at the ready waiting for their next Fuehrer to emerge. QAnon and the Proud Boys do enjoy substantial support in Republican clubs, but the main event for the right will be screwing with Biden’s appointments, and how they do this depends on who has the Senate majority after January. In the meantime, expect terrible reactionary rulings from Trump’s now-and-almost-forever rightist Supreme Court. The reformist Biden “socialists” have done nothing to prepare the masses to fight these decisions on the streets and Biden himself has said he doesn’t want to when he said he does not favor packing the court. We want to abolish the court! We see it as a survival of the slavocracy and as an enforcer of capitalist class rule based on original intent. The right to property as the supreme bourgeois right which excludes the many as it favors the few.
The pink left (DSA types) and the left wing of the Democrats (the Eleanor Roosevelt/ MLK wing) live with the illusion that the fascist threat has been defused and things will return to a tolerable centrist normality. They never expected Biden/Harris to fulfil their dreams of a Green New Deal or Universal Health Care or free public education from Day Care through University and guaranteed work for all. Of course they were and have always been incrementalists, ‘pragmatists’ who like their darling of American ‘Marxism’ Richard Wolff argues the transition to socialism is akin to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, misusing the historical materialist method to argue that the forms of the new mode of production arise inside the old. For Wolff this means the cooperative movement like the Basque Mondragon model. For this wing of “Marxism” the socialist revolution does not come through Class Warfare either defensive or offensive but creeps in along the cracks like mice.
The electoral gains of self-styled socialist Democrats.
Groups like DSA are swelling as one would expect, even as the Bernie wing is in crisis. The promise of social gains without Class War is, of course, more attractive to youth in transition from liberalism to socialism. Many of the socialist and anarchist groups have had internal struggles from the influx of petty bourgeois. People who want socialism, particularly youth, need to see who and what the DSA leaders are!
It is our job to say they will fob you off until the planet is a cinder hurtling into the sun! With them, it is just a calendar question when the cops will bust your skull. Or the fascists. Slick Willie Clinton ran on good job full employment, a healthcare plan that “could never be taken away”, and we found out what that meant and it was deregulation. We need to keep repeating what a fool’s errand “tax the rich” is under a bourgeois state. Moving the tax receipts money clip from one pocket to the other in the capitalists’ pants doesn’t change the path trod by their state! The workers’ solution is the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy without compensation to the big shareholders and running production under workers control. We fight for a workers’ government, a new workers’ International and world socialist revolution!
Democrats Offer Nothing But Continuing Capitalist Crises
The Biden administration will not be able to address the current economic crisis or the pandemic except to attack the working class. The capitalist economic crisis, exacerbated by the out of control pandemic, cannot be resolved short of either the ruling class driving the working class yet further into the ground in order to restore profit rates or through socialist revolution. The capitalists have not recovered their lost rate of profit from the 2007-08 crisis, despite the worsening conditions of the working class. Capitalist crises are part and parcel of the capitalist system, driven by the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPTF). The economic crisis and the pandemic, with the corresponding mass unemployment provides the ruling class with a powerful opportunity to escalate attacks on our class. It is urgent that we unite the whole class: the employed, the unemployed, those in schools and training and those permanently disabled, the incarcerated, the former prisoners and the retired.
Biden’s cabinet shows his intent toward “realpolitik” reaching across the aisle, i.e. the “normalcy” reality, not the masses’ wishes, exhibiting no indication of the economic collapse. Post election partying does not make employment, and the class divide itself will be apparent soon enough. Who can fight the oppressor? The weathervane Biden, who is “shoot ‘em in the legs Joe” from Dupont more often than “lunchbox.” Joe from Scranton? NOT! Congress has yet to pass additional pandemic relief and there is little to indicate they will anytime soon. We cannot wait until January or what might be never! And any relief that may come will not be enough, but only partial and temporary.
Does the working class have potential class allies? What is class independence and why it is essential.
There are only two classes which contend for power in modern capitalist society: the working class and the capitalists, with the middle class, the petty-bourgeoisie layer of small business people, small farmers, and professionals occupying a middle strata between.The petty-bourgeoisie cannot play an independent role. They will either side with Capital or can be won to the side of the working class, the only productive and thus only revolutionary class under capitalism. As demonstrated by Trumpism, Modiism and Bolsonarism this despairing middle layer along with backward sections of the working class can be driven into the arms of social reaction and fascism if the working class fails to organize and point the way forward to economic enfranchisement. The Democratic Party non-solutions over the decades have paved the way for the social reaction that Trump represents.
Winning over the middle classes requires bold revolutionary working class leadership and political program. Addressing the needs of the ruined middle classes, uniting them with the working class, must be done on the basis of proletarian leadership and a clear working class program, not bankrupt liberalism.
The fight for working class independence means the fight for both political program and organizational independence from all sections of the capitalist ruling class. This does not mean playing loyal “opposition”, trying to pressure the Democrats leftward or calling for a vote for a Democratic Party candidate, to place them in political office, as a “tactic”. It means a clear political opposition to all bourgeois parties and organizations and those who promote bourgeois ideology in the workers movement: the Democratic and Republicans parties, the liberal NGO’s and activist orgs, the sellout labor bureaucracy and the various socialist orgs who politically support the Democrats.
The objective conditions for capitalism’s demise has long since arrived. What is primarily lacking now is the subjective factor of history, a class conscious working class “for-itself” and the corresponding workers and oppressed organizations that would arise from that. And most importantly, revolutionary workers parties and a new revolutionary workers International. Workers and oppressed need to mobilize under our own independent banner, with our own methods of struggle, our own political program and our own working class struggle organizations and workers party. The subjective factor will not be built through the Democratic Party that is the “graveyard of struggle” or through liberal reformism. It will be built through a clear Marxist program and class struggle.
Proletarian Internationalism is a Necessity!
Workers exist on every continent and in every country, internationally and in all the major industrialized nations we are the majority of people. Everywhere our labor power is exploited and surplus value is turned into profit for a billionaire capitalist class who roam the world in search of better returns.The working class has no interest in maintaining national separations. Capitalist nation states exist to benefit the capitalist class of the nations not the workers and oppressed. To ensure those returns, armies of police and thugs are sustained to contain workers struggles. We know the capitalist uses their national boundaries to protect their interests and control us-sending their arms and military advisors and actors wherever needed to crush workers strikes, rebellions and revolutions. They play one group of workers off against each other accentuating superficial differences of gender, religion, skin color, ethnicity to advance sectarian individualist ideologies against the natural tendency of workers and oppressed toward solidarity and unity in action.
Working class internationalism means defending the democratic rights of migrants, to oppose deportations no matter what their “legal” status, and to struggle for full employment and citizenship rights for all migrants and refugees.
It means defending the right of the colonies and semi-colonies to self-determination. Cancel the debt! For the independence of Puerto Rico!
It means opposing U.S. imperialist military actions. We reach out in for unity and working class solidarity to Chinese and Russin working class and say “Our main enemy is at home!” U.S. out of MENA! Reverse the Pacific Pivot!
It means uniting in joint struggle with our working class sisters and brothers abroad.
The workers party in the U.S.A, may be initiated by a left leaning wing of the union bureaucracy which holds back from declaring its proletarian internationalism’ this would be more than a mistake or a rhetorical concession to the dominance of Patriotism. It would be treacherous and sow the seeds of defeat in the founding of the Workers Party. We see great war danger in the present collisions of the U.S. imperialist-led bloc and the China/Russia imperialist blocs, and the frequency of these collisions is increasing, as the ruling class casts about for some exit from their perpetual profits crisis. For peace to be won the workers in the imperialist countries must disarm the capitalist ruling classes and their war machines. Only internationalist workers solidarity can secure peace! That’s no platitude but a call to a plan.
Socialism is the Answer!
The masses are well-aware that we are in a period of increasing capitalist crises as witnessed by the recent struggles that have broken out. Many are looking again to socialism, as they understand it, as the answer. Instead of diverting this right back into the Democratic Party and utopian capitalist reforms, the working class and oppressed must chart an independent course of struggle against the capitalist system and for workers’ rule. Socialist revolution, whether it succeeds in the United States first, in another imperialist country, or in the colonial/semi-colonial world, must be extended on an international scale in order to resolve the problems of capitalist exploitation, economic crises, wars, pandemics, racism, poverty, epidemics and climate catastrophe.
A workers party would provide the necessary leadership to fight for workers power, a workers government based on democratic workers councils and a workers militia that would establish a workers state to expropriate the capitalists and carry out the socialist tasks.
A collectivized, centrally-planned world socialist economy under democratic workers control with production for society’s needs instead of profit would lift human society to new levels. It would allow the marshalling of maximum human potential and resources to solve the catastrophic problems of pandemics and climate catastrophe and build a rational world society of social equality, cooperation and plenty.
For World Socialist Revolution!
