Creating Change (1)

There is an entire range of horrendous and growing problems we face locally and globally every day. It is not just climate change, or war, or poverty and homelessness. It is much, much more. It is things getting worse and we, the people, are losing badly by virtually every measure. We are up to our necks in debt. We can’t find a job and if we do find a job, that job is insecure, low-wage, with few if any employee benefits. This is a world in which union-bashing, out-sourcing,  temporary work, zero- hour contracts, stagnant wages, and growing inequality are the norm.

76 percent of respondents in a Wall Street Journal poll did not feel confident that their children’s generation will have a better life than they. Over the past 15 years there was more than a 50 percent increase in people thinking there is a lack of opportunity in America (it is now just about half of all Americans). And 59 percent of Americans believe the American Dream is impossible to achieve for most people. We don't have to read Thomas Piketty to understand how much worse the currently unacceptable inequality is going to be ten years from now, or to even try to guess how many trillions of dollars of wealth are sitting hidden off shore, or in countries like Ireland, where Apple keeps billions to avoid paying taxes.

These pessimistic views of the future are rational, as their lives have become so much more difficult and depressing.  People are working longer hours, working far past previous retirement age—if they can retire at all. Many Americans do not take vacations. And many Americans of all ages can't find good jobs, or can only find low-paying and often part-time work, which causes their lifestyles to plummet. College graduates are burdened with heavy debt. More than 45 million people, or 14.5 percent of all Americans, lived below the poverty line last year, the  Census Bureau reported. The annual income threshold for being counted as living in poverty was $11,490 last year for a person and $23,550 for a family of four. Poverty is particularly dire for single mothers: A third of all families headed by single women were in poverty last year—that's 15.6 million such households. The black poverty rate was 27.2 percent. More than 11 million black Americans lived below the poverty level last year. About 42.5 percent of the households headed by single black women were in poverty. The Hispanic poverty rate was 23.5 percent. The number of American children with chronic illnesses has quadrupled since the time when some of their parents wer kids, portending more disability and higher health costs for a new generation of adults, a study estimates. An almost fourfold increase in childhood obesity in the past
three decades, twice the asthma rates since the 1980s, and a jump in the number of attention-deficit disorder cases, according to researchers .

There is often what seems like police-state repression and the criminalization of poverty, homelessness, drug use, and of immigrants, people of color, and often those who venture to protest and express their constitutional rights. Things may feel relatively fine for many educated white folks living on the coasts and in cities and university towns, but this will not last. Sooner or later the rising tides of massive inequality and increased repression will affect most of us.

The corporate, business-state power nexus use their massive money, infrastructure and energy to turn the existing propaganda, political and business lobbying machine into a juggernaut.  There are large numbers of organizers, highly visible gatherings of the faithful, and a powerful media and online presence—complemented by an eagerly compliant corporate media which repeats reactionary and business talking points like stenographers. There are thousands of paid pro-capitalist talking heads on all the media, as well as lavishly funded think-tanks which all hugely dominates the news and influences public attitudes. They now can pretty much stop any major laws from passing in America on the national level. They have tilted politics far enough in their favor, that people at large lacks the power to regain the balance. There is massive lobbying budgets (analyst James Thurber estimated that the actual number of working lobbyists in Washington was close to 100,000 and the industry brings in $9 billion annually) and corruption on many levels. For them it is a class war; and they are not interested in compromise. We do live in a complex society where the occasional success gets appropriately celebrated, like gay marriage, which is seen as proof of how things are going to change, and not as an anomaly that it is, which doesn’t threaten corporate power and profit since gay marriage has been somewhat of a boon for the business sector, and many corporations support it.

 It is a basic tenet of politics that corporate power rules the roost. Nothing significant that will become law if corporate power, profits, global competitive advantage, military might, national security and privatization are in any significant way threatened. Reformst optimists talk about how things are going to change: something better is right around the corner; the pendulum is going to swing back, what goes around comes around, etc. It ain’t going to happen. Every indicator signals that things are going to get much worse.

The problem is that people don't know what to do. They are asked to sign dozens of petitions, to give money to a myriad of uncoordinated, stand-alone one-issue causes. For most people elections change nothing. Rarely is there someone to vote for who might even try to shake up the system. As research has shown, the entire political apparatus serves the wealthy almost exclusively—and especially those who donate to the parties and politicians. The reformists continue to do the same thing over and over as if things will actually change by continuing along the same path. Einstein describes such repetitive compulsion "insanity," and he had a point. Year in and year out, the reformers write essentially the same books and articles, advocating for muc the same policies,  meeting with one other at the same conferences and seminars, discussing the same old issues.

Very little  power and energy is invested in serious organizing. We all can easily imagine many ways our world could be better. We have all the analysis we need. We have access to a tremendous amount of information to understand the cause and cure of virtually every social problem. Workers have great thinkers, comprehensive information, hundreds of compelling books about all of the horrors of the economic crises, of racism and sexism, of the climate change, and so much more. There are great people working on crucial issues.  But we do not have a clue how to address these myriad of problems in a political way. This is in stark contrast to the corporate state that dominates in order to relentlessly cut social programmes, lower taxes, privatize government, erode women's rights, and so on and so on. Yes, change will come, but it very well might not be the change we want. It might be a lot scarier than they are right now.

There has been both a sharp decline in union membership and influence, as anti-union campaigns have decimated the union movement. The State of Michigan, the birthplace of the auto-workers and the labour vision, is now a right-to-work state. The same can be said of those hosts of community organizers that they have moved away from efforts to exercise power, to make trouble and push for change. Instead, they “study” things and become  advocates for policy shifts that fits in too comfortably with the status quo, despite thousands of people within it who are unhappy with their feelings of impotence and lack of change. Cooperatives may sound very nice but their history is just as dismal as that of any capitalist enterprise in initiating change and
eliminating poverty.

The Socialist Party’s organising principle is to get people to change their consciousness and think hard about revolution. We need to get more radical. Higher levels of  political education and discussion is necessary. We have to sget down to the basics, not indulging in palliatives and patching-up but demanding a real difference. Let's stop fantasizing about how capitalist world should be in an ideal world when there isn't the remotest chance of those ideas coming to fruition. Let's focus on building local and regional strength, on organising thousands of activists and bringing people together in ways they do not feel they on their own. Flooding the airwaves with deceptive advertising only works on the uninformed. People who know what's going on are not deceived - in fact, are angered - by lies told to them. We win when we knock on doors and have conversations with those who don't vote and ask them what they care about. We need to educate ourselves and then we can engage with others in our families, with our friends and among  our  communities.

Today we witness the media providing Russell Brand with the platform of newspaper and television to espouse revolution and this access is offered because he is no threat whatsoever without a movement. Chomsky in an interview with David Barsamian said that “there is no real Left now” in the U.S... “If you are just counting heads,” Chomsky elaborated, “there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they…don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things.”

The Marxist Gramsci said
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” He rephrased it “This crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Dark shadows are already looming and a divided and disorganised movement will be all too easily defeated. What we require is inspiration to restore confidence.  We need Brand's ability to express hope, and acclaim the various recent struggles from the Zapatista's, Occupy, Rojava, which are constructing  the political spaces so we can raise the arguments of long forgotten or ignored people...Debs, Bookchin and Pannekoek, to name just a few and drawing on  their ideas and merging with our own case for socialism and the future. We must go beyond mere protest and to begin to build. We need to offer feasible alternatives that (for all their flaws) to serve as  examples of what we are trying to strive towards. If we ourselves keep offering nagativity, then that is what we will receive in return. This doesn't mean we are critical but it does mean offering  criticism in a comradely fashion. The reality is that wherever there is resistance we are ceding ground to the reformists. We saw it with Occupy, their lofty aims reduced to currency crankism and a return to one issue campaigns. We live in an enormously technological society where, if it was not for capitalism, we would all have more than enough to live long, healthy, interesting lives. Let us establish a community-based economic and political system, where we can all have satisfying jobs. We can all have food security and food safety. We can all have real education and real health care. And so, it remains for us, the people, to devise a system of self-government, a system of procuring community wisdom and of locking out every one of the exploiting class.

Finally to quote Rosa Luxemburg “The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history. Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”

Adapted from (and added to) here