The deteriorating economic situation for millions of Americans is generating both a rising tide of people fighting for their basic needs and a ruling-class turn toward fascist solutions to crush the resistance. This clash is setting the stage for possibly the most unstable presidential election season in a hundred years and the further polarization – and possible destruction – of one or both major parties in America’s two-party system.

The underlying cause of the crisis is the leap to automated digital production, including artificial intelligence (AI). The technological revolution is literally replacing and discarding human workers. This not only creates a surge of impoverishment, but it also makes it impossible to circulate commodities. As industrial profitability declines, capital flows to the financial and real estate sectors instead. When financial profitability falters, it leads to the host of regional bank failures we are experiencing and threatens the collapse of the commercial real estate market.

The result is further impoverishment. Workers are facing a rash of post-pandemic evictions, rent increases, and government reductions in basic services. Rents in the United States rose an average of over 14% from 2021 to 2022, with increases of over 40% in some cities. Some 17 million Americans are losing their Medicaid health care as we speak, due to the expiration of pandemic requirements for states to maintain their coverage. Food stamps were already cut in March for some 50 million Americans and the child tax credit has been slashed. The spike in poverty has made it the fourth leading cause of death in the richest country in the world. People of color are disproportionately impacted.

A moment of history

The underlying economic transformation and the breadth of the resistance are driving the social movements toward new tactics and increasing class unity to defend their livelihoods. Nowhere was this better expressed than in the remarks by SAG AFTRA union president Fran Drescher when she announced the screen actors’ strike on July 13:

“What happens here is important because what’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor, when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and forget about the essential contributors that make their machine run. … This is a moment of history and is a moment of truth. If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines and big business, who cares more about Wall Street than you and your family? Most of Americans don’t have more than $500 in case of an emergency. … At some point, you have to say ‘No, we’re not going to take this anymore.’ … We’re not going to keep doing incremental changes on a contract that no longer honors what is happening right now with this business model that was foisted on us.”

But the screen actors and writers – who are directly threatened by the introduction of AI in their industry – are only articulating a transformation also being expressed in strikes by hotel workers, school workers, teachers, and academic workers at the University of California. They have found they cannot defend themselves without defending their communities and without addressing all the major social and political issues impacting their lives: housing costs, homelessness, immigration rights, access to health care, public education, reproductive freedom, reimagining police, and protecting the earth. All the various social movements are experiencing the same challenge. Their demands are pushing them beyond one-sided economic or social struggles and step by step toward class demands, a class program, class unity and political struggle.

As increasing numbers of people unite around basic demands, they enter the electoral arena and run for office on working-class programs. The ruling class, in turn, responds with desperate measures designed to limit voting, restrict or outlaw protests, divide and attack groups based on race and gender and, ultimately, to crush democracy altogether.

Party polarization in 2024

The result is the profound instability we are experiencing in the political arena as we approach the 2024 elections. Both major ruling class parties are polarizing, due to the absolute inability of party leaders to offer solutions to the desperate demands and rising resistance of people in either party, whether urban or rural.

The Biden-McCarthy so-called debt ceiling negotiations were an attempt to restore and shore up the ruling class bipartisanship of 2011-2016, but just as happened in 2016, it is only aggravating the polarizations and proving once again that the ruling class can no longer rule in the same old way. The bipartisan austerity legislation protected the profits of corporations but it is threatening HUD housing subsidies, health care, nutrition, childcare, and education of the working class. There is no question that austerity is the overall agenda of the ruling class, but it is increasingly difficult to advocate poverty and hardship and get elected.

The Republican Party is evolving into two wings. The grouping around Trump is coalescing around its plan for an outright fascist seizure of the federal government. Its election denialism and open support of the January 6 insurrection make it clear that if elected, it has no intention of ever surrendering power again. The other (equally dangerous) wing around the Southern governors is organizing for a more incremental approach to fascism, spreading step by step outward from its base in the Southern state legislatures and state and federal courts. A Trump victory in the Republican primaries may split the party by producing a third-party No Labels candidacy. And a Trump loss in the primaries may also split the party, by leading to a Trump third-party candidacy.

Polarization in the Republican Party also opens the door to instability among Democrats as well. The desperate attempt to unite the Democratic Party behind the pro-corporate candidacy of Joe Biden is already shaky enough, based on his failure to deliver on Build Back Better, voting rights, student debt cancellation, and many of the other promises he made when he ran in 2020. The right-wing populist campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is polling at up to 20% and is capable of delivering major damage to Biden. Lyndon Johnson was undone in the 1968 Democratic primaries despite polling numbers some 10 points above Biden’s at a similar point in the campaign.

It is also important to remember that the funders of both No Labels and RFK Jr. include significant fascist and former Trump supporters and both could easily be weaponized to support the fascist offensive in the general election campaign.

Revolutionary tactics

The intense instability demands revolutionaries who train and equip themselves to be able to make rapid tactical decisions as the situation develops. The path forward demands a clear-eyed and disciplined fight for unity of the revolutionary movement of displaced workers – and those in danger of displacement – for their basic needs, including fighting forward for the still unmet demands of the George Floyd rebellion. The movement is for both economic and political democracy. Moving into 2024, we need to elevate the victories won in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, and Michigan as the foundation for national work, while continuing to push forward locally where new, young working-class candidates are running for office. “Take Back Our City” movements can serve as essential organizing bases. Local elections are where many of the most basic economic demands of the workers are being fought out – as well as one of the key targets for the Bannon-Trump fascists to build their base. We need to rely on and double down on the victories of the reproductive freedom movement from Kansas to Kentucky as well as unite with efforts to pass ballot measures in Ohio, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and elsewhere.

In 2020, it was relatively straightforward for workers to unite with the Bernie Sanders program during the primary season. This year it is more complex. We unite with those Democrats who have proven to be reliable defenders of people’s basic needs, either by joining the Squad or by resisting the Biden deficit deal. At the same time, we utilize the independent, openly abolitionist campaign of Dr. Cornel West to further expose and repudiate the pro-corporate wing of the Democrats. He has so far masterfully avoided manipulation by elements attempting to exploit his campaign to benefit fascist Republicans.

Revolutionaries continue along the course of uniting scattered struggles into a united, multi-racial, multi-generational political struggle for a better world. We discern and advocate the right alliances and compromises necessary to defeat fascism, while always continuing to elevate the needs of the revolutionary class that is forced to fight the private property system just to be able to survive. At every step of the struggle, we point out the extraordinary wealth that exists in our world, and the fact that nothing but our own short-sightedness and lack of social vision prevent us from restructuring our society to enable all of our people to share in the abundance that is everywhere around us.

Published on August 28, 2023
This article originated in Rally!
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