The first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat.
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto
My aim is to reinvent the wheel. My goal is to impeach or remove the Trump regime and, yes, to preach to the choir.
Resistance to fascism can and will take many forms. I write in the autumn of 2020. It is still possible to prevent the fascist juggernaut from sweeping away every gain won by workers in the United States since the 1880s, but well have to move quickly and back up our votes with militant direct action.
Public education, clean running water and sanitation, public libraries, the nations food supply, the last remaining forests, womens, Black, gay liberation and in fact everyones civil liberties as well, reproductive rights and personal privacy, are all under attack as never before. Corporate pollution threatens the most out-of-the-way corners of the planet. A novel pandemic is upon us, a wave to what to expect in the future (if there is to be a future)? There is no let-up, and climate chaos is already coming faster than we can deal with. Whole island nations are now submerged under water; the Arctic ice caps are melting; and mass applications of pesticides and genetically engineered crops are destroying our food supplies and sacred places, and taking over the worlds agricultural lands.
Neither liberalism nor conservatism, which dance around us as in the guises of Democrats and Republicans, present real solutions, but thats all were offered. We trap ourselves in a fundamentally immoral liberal imperialism, on the one hand, and the neo-conservatives transfer of trillions of dollars in wealth from pretty much all of us to the wealthy, on the other. Liberals and Conservatives (both mislabeled as Democrats and Republicans) are equally deadly and equally bringing us to the brink of nuclear war, although via separate paths. They are twin horses of Apocalypse, the one thundering alongside the other in pretend battles like jousting knights of olde. Ecological collapse due to global climate chaos threatens to end complex life on this planet unless we the people rise up coherently the poor, the once-upon-a-time workers who are being primed to slit each others throats in competition for the increasingly scarce and privatized water, hospital beds, individual dwellings, jobs and needed services. Who among us will be our Harriet Tubman, leading us to freedom?
The candidacy of Bernie Sanders for U.S. President in the Democratic Party had raised the concept of socialism in the mainstream corporate media for the first time in a century as a cure for the parasites of capitalism the Capitalist Infesto. The corporate-controlled Democratic Party leadership smashed him down. Bernie was not allowed to go deep enough; he wasnt allowed to continue. Should he have stuck to his guns (so to speak) and seen it through? Perhaps. But is that the issue we want to fight out today? The immediate issue: Can new and overtly socialist ecological movements arise, obstruct, and reverse the current transformation of U.S. society into overt fascism, which is prelude to creating the new society we really want to live in?
I write not to explain the ins and outs of the terrible tragedies were facing but for the new generations to seize hold of the lessons from the new left the 60s generation which have been stolen, co-opted, perverted and sold back to us as our false paths to freedom.
Black Lives matter! Reproductive Rights matter! Workers rights matter! The fights against industrial pollution and global climate chaos matter! Can we understand the meanings of our own movements and allow the lessons embedded in them to blossom, a gift from one generation to the next? That requires new ways of thinking and putting those thoughts into practice.
So, let us vote for the evil of two lessers, of course, to stay the blade of fascism and white supremacy but in doing so let us also keep in mind that even the lesser evil is still evil, still imperialist. So let us use this moment to also begin to build the kind of revolutionary mass-movements necessary to transform this society!
