Welcome to 2021: History Is Going Somewhere

2020 gave us the worst health crisis in 100 years, and along with it the worst economic crisis in 100 years. It was a year in which COVID-19 took 400,000 lives and in which we saw joblessness, hunger, and homelessness grow exponentially while the government showed itself to be totally incapable of resolving the crisis. This was the context for growing unrest and a rising social movement demanding that the needs of the people be addressed. The murder of George Floyd was the spark that ignited the flame that awakened millions who arose in protest across the country. The elections saw a record turnout at the polls, as more than 155 million voted, while the events of January 6 reflected the enormous polarization taking place in the country.

If we thought that with the dawning of a new year, we could put all of that behind us, reality intrudes. The pandemic is still with us, the effects of an economic crisis that hits the workers on the bottom the hardest are still ongoing, and a polarized society divided on which way to go forward and how best to resolve the crisis in the interests of the most exploited and oppressed, marks the intense social struggle unfolding before us.

We are accustomed to measuring time as increments of a quantity. A year is a quantity of time. Each month, week, day, hour, and second marks the passing of time. But if 2020 teaches us anything, it is that time – history – is much more than that. There are nodal points, such as the uprisings in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, from which there is no going back. The advent of the pandemic has changed our world. As we go forward in the coming year, and in those to follow, we will experience more such nodal lines, more such moments. We are on a journey. History is taking us somewhere. And as Martin Luther King reminds us, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”

What we are describing here is actually the quantitative development of a quality of time. Qualities of time are demarked as historical epochs. Our epoch is defined as the epoch of electronics, a time initiated by the introduction of qualitatively new tools of production: robotics and other electronic means of production are laborless, performed without the labor-power of human workers. That is fundamentally antagonistic to capitalism and is the basis for its ongoing destruction. It also creates a new class of workers who are being cast aside and who must fight for a new society based on the distribution of human needs without money from wages. This is the content of our time.

In spite of how we may have come to perceive these times as dark ones, we look to the future with hope and confidence that history is on the side of our class. As Amanda Gorman said in her Inaugural poem, America is an “unfinished” project. “There is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it, if only we are brave enough to be it.”

Published: February 09, 2021
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