Defending Democracy
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Defending Democracy
Summer wildfires and hurricanes, new pandemic variants, and the grisly fascist offensive have cast a cloud of doom over American society. These are signs of the death throes of global capitalism. But while the symptoms are grave, they do not determine our fate, as long as we can change the system. Capitalism and the private property that it rests on are temporary forms of social organization. They were created by human beings, and they can be overturned and discarded by human beings.
Throughout history, people have survived famines, slavery, and world wars. There is no reason we cannot also solve the problems we face today, not only to survive but in order to build a beautiful future. The question is how to do it.
Voting Rights
The first step is to address the ruling class strategy of a fascist offensive. It has expanded from the January 6 insurrection into attempts not only to defend but glorify the insurrectionists. The national movement to eliminate the right to vote includes not only the state legislation to suppress voting and tamper with the count. It now includes extreme gerrymandering, and the attempt to impose the “Independent State Legislature” doctrine to overturn the popular vote in presidential elections. Fascist organizers in California used an undemocratic recall process to unsuccessfully attempt to install a pro-Trump governor in a state with only 24 percent Republican voters.
Fascism is not simply or exclusively partisan, however. The fascist attacks by “blue state” Democrat governors on unhoused people, for example, are a critical tactical component of the overall assault on democracy and human rights. It is not possible to defeat the fascist offensive without defeating its strategy. Attacking the enemy’s tactics cannot win the war. In fact, the enemy’s tactics today are specifically designed to divide us, by geography, color, gender, religion, immigration status, and a host of other features.
The battle for voting rights is often depicted in mainstream discourse as an African American or Latino issue, but this is a half-truth. While people of color are frequently targeted and attacked, the impact extends to vast sections of the working class regardless of color. Every day, elected officials and election outcomes decide life and death issues around health care, reproductive rights, the economy, foreign policy, and more. To address this reality, the Poor People’s Campaign has tied its battle for voting rights to the fight for a $15 minimum wage.
Discarded Workers
The root of the problem is that the automation and AI of the tech economy are steadily eliminating the need for human labor. On the one hand, this is creating a new class of impoverished workers with little if any access to good jobs and no viable future in the private property economy. The ruling class is resorting to fascist dictatorship because it has no intention of allowing this new class to influence government decision-making or in any way interfere with the maximization of corporate profit.
On the other hand, the new technology itself creates the possibility of achieving 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, of healing the earth, and of eliminating global poverty through astounding improvements in productivity — if only we can wrestle it out of the hands of corporate profiteers and turn it over to the people, before the private property system irreversibly damages the planet.
Within our present system, displaced workers cannot survive without taking their fight for housing, health care, and the environment into the very political arena that the ruling class is trying to drive them from. Because its numbers are so rapidly growing, especially among the youth, and because it has no stake in the status quo, this new class is compelled, and has the power, to overturn the system and build a new society. The resistance to fascism not only has to unite all who can be united, but also must specifically ground itself in this new class of discarded workers, to lead the fight for true democracy and a new society.
Basic Needs Democrats
The most effective tactics are therefore those that tie defense of democracy to the battle to meet the immediate demands of the people. The early August victory in the fight to extend the eviction moratorium was a perfect example. It happened on the same day as the loss by would-be Squad member Nina Turner in Ohio. Turner was leading in the contest for an open Congressional seat in the Cleveland-Akron area, when the Democratic Party establishment closed ranks against her and brought about her defeat. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Majority for Israel, and Congressional Black Caucus spent together some $6 million to defeat Turner, when the money should have been spent defeating Republican voting rights opponents in the 2022 midterm elections.
Squad member Cori Bush faced off against the same Democratic establishment, when the President and Democratic-controlled Congress failed to extend the eviction moratorium on July 30. She and her Squad allies combined direct action, legislative maneuvering, and sophisticated media messaging to force the President to sign off on the extension, over the outraged protests of the real estate lobby. On the one hand, based on the urgency and basic needs character of the issue, she was able to leverage her position as someone who herself was a formerly unhoused mom. On the other hand, she was also able to effectively mobilize the support of Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus, the very forces who defeated Nina Turner.
The visionary approach of the Squad —that dedicated group of Congress members leading what might be called the basic needs section of the Democrats — is forcing Biden and the corporate Democrats to fight for the infrastructure bill. It coordinated with a #SealTheDeal mobilization by groups like the Sunrise Movement, Indivisible, and Movement for Black Lives to keep the bill alive despite a massive corporate lobbying effort to kill it.
If passed, the $3.5 trillion would have included universal pre-K programs; wage increases for childcare workers; a child tax credit; paid family leave; dental, vision, and hearing benefits for Medicare recipients; lower prescription drug prices; expansion of the Affordable Care Act; free community college tuition; investments in historically Black colleges; increased Pell grants; investments in public housing, the Housing Trust Fund, and community land trusts; benefits for immigrants; collective bargaining; a Climate Conservation Corps; pollution fees; forest fire prevention; reduction of carbon emissions; and development of clean energy.
The basic needs victories won in these battles along the way are key to developing a strategy for defeating fascism and defending democracy. Next steps include expansion of the Squad by electing more progressive challengers against corporate Democrats in 2022. At the same time, every victory serves as an indispensable platform for the further education and organization of the dispossessed class, taking further steps toward political independence from both the major pro-corporate parties. RC
November.December 2021 Vol31.Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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