The global warming climate catastrophe
Here, despite the uncontested facts, the world’s major powers press on to increase fossil fuel production in the face of ever-intensifying killer heat waves, deadly floods and hurricanes, inundation of low lying land masses, drying up and poisoning of major water supplies – all accompanied by unprecedented environmental destruction across the board. Forests are decimated, oceans and rivers are irreversibly polluted, air is poisoned, and nature is torn asunder, with no end in sight. All of the above are the undeniable reality everywhere. And all this in the context of leading scientists repeatedly informing the world that humanity’s timeline to accomplish fundamental change was fast approaching before irreversible catastrophe threatened our very existence! That catastrophe is today upon us. Yet fossil fuel production has consistently increased! Fossil fuel wars are on the rise! Offshore drilling is on the rise with the $billionaire corporations obscenely competing over the right to drill the Arctic Circle now that global warming is increasingly melting the ice caps! And while poor nations like Pakistan are ravaged by unprecedented monsoon floods with millions dead and dispossessed, fertile land washed away, crops destroyed en masse and millions left to stave! Pakistan’s catastrophe is repeated everywhere!
Dominated by the major capitalist powers, the UN’s periodic Conference of Parties (COP) gatherings have become infamous in their absolute bankruptcy.
In the U.S. the Democrat’s proposed and much hyped $6 trillion “Green Revolution” and related infrastructure promises were gutted and reduced to $1.5 trillion over ten years, with the vast proportion allocated to the corporate elite.
Under Trump, environmental horrors have escalated with Trump virtually banning all serious efforts to significantly expand clean energy while simultaneously expanding the use of deadly fossil fuel everywhere.
Imperialism’s de-industrialization strategy
Driven by ever-increasing pressures on profit rates, the major powers have significantly shifted production of increasing numbers of major and minor commodities to low wage, non-union countries, where labor and social rights barely exist. Simultaneously, and for the same reasons, past economic and social gains won in struggle in the major capitalist nations are steadily eroded on every front.
In the U.S. the percentage of unionized workers stands at a 100-plus year low. Social benefits are increasingly eroded whether it in the form of decreased access to medical care and unemployment insurance or public education and other vital social services. Mortgage foreclosures and evictions are in the rise. Rampant inflation, daily robs millions of the basic means of subsistence. Rising mortgage interest rates, skyrocketing real estate prices and rental costs increasingly threaten broad sections of the population. Homelessness is on the rise everywhere. Tens of millions of workers “live” in the low wage part-time, casual or gig economy subordinate labor force. Announced unemployment figures have no correspondence to reality. The claimed and touted current rate of 4.2 percent masks the more accurate and official 2026 Labor Participation Rate of 61.5 percent. [That is, today, only 61.5 percent of the working class is effectively employed.] Child labor in major U.S. factories is on the rise. In poor nations it is the norm!
In all cases women workers suffer the brunt of capitalism’s ever-deepening crises. In poor nations uncompetitive factories employing women at near slave wages are closed and converted to corporate run sex slave operations. Capitalism’s degradation of human beings knows no limits!
Erosion of basic democratic rights
The Supreme Court’s abolition of Roe v. Wade and its reactionary aftermath across the country informs us that basic democratic rights won in struggle decades ago can never be taken for granted. The court’s decision, long in the making, remains the present pretext to launch a broadside attack not only on the basic right of women to control their own bodies, but also on a broad range of related critical issues that openly threaten women today, including outright imprisonment, denial of health care access and to safe and effective abortion-inducing medications, denial of critical medical treatment under any circumstances and more. The Democrats have long been complicit in this generalized assault on women, from their decades-long and repeated refusal to abolish the infamous Hyde Amendment to their failure to pass fundamental abortion rights legislature when they controlled both chambers of the U.S. government.
The abolition of the constitutional right to abortion redounds against women on every front, exacerbating the increasing cutbacks in childcare, fostering widening wage differentials and continued job and promotion discrimination, while justifying sexual harassment and violence. With regard to all of the above, the direct and indirect effect of the attacks against women are to maintain and intensify the capitalist objective of extracting profits from the most oppressed sectors of the population. Intimidation and control are among capitalism’s prime objectives.
Sexism, racism, LGBTQ+ discrimination, and attacks against immigrants and all the oppressed, in all their myriad forms, serve to divide and demoralize the working class, scapegoat the most oppressed and pit one section against the other, with the objective of turning workers against workers and not against the boss.
The June 24, 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade ruled that the Constitution does not confer the right to abortion and that this authority must be returned to the states. Today, only 30 states have affirmed the right to abortion although some with significant limits. Ballot initiatives of varying types are planned for the November 2026 ballot with the Democrats, once again substituting electoral efforts for anything resembling a mass action strategy.
The War On Women
Every day since the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision revoking Roe states have been eliminating laws that protected the right to abortion. Republican state legislators, governors, and judges have enthusiastically stripped away the basic right of body autonomy and the right to health care.
Abortion is totally banned in 13 states today. Several others are considering or already passed laws that virtually bans or severely restricts abortions. Fifteen states are described as “hostile” with strict bans just short of prohibition.
Abortion providers are disappearing from these states.
The national landscape is one of deadly chaos, as those seeking abortion and abortion providers contend with a new and confusing array of rules, laws, rulings and medical responses.
The atrocities escalated as soon as the court decision was announced. Girls who were rape victims were denied abortion. Women could be forced to carry a dead fetus, as doctors would face huge fines and long prison sentences for performing an abortion. Women were unable to get an abortion after they miscarried and endured hours of painful labor. Women had to endure arduous journeys to find an abortion provider. Women with cancer will now have to wait until they are sicker before an abortion is allowed.
Democrats organize “mass actions” to disorient social movements
Today the major national women’s organizations, for decades increasingly subordinate to the Democrats, offer no strategic orientation to winning the right to abortion, or any other basic rights for women, other than resort to the Democratic Party’s electoral apparatus. When NOW, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, or any of the myriad of NGO’s – all increasingly dominated by corporate executives and funding – do advocate and organize mass protests, they are invariably to feature Democratic Party politicians and to advocate and organize to getting out the vote.
Building INDEPENDENT mass movements
Over the past decades we have learned some important lessons regarding the role of mass movements in the struggle for fundamental social change, as has the U.S. ruling class itself. During the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement era mass protests were almost entirely in the purview of independent fighting social movements. They were almost universally shunned, attacked, discredited, red-baited or restricted (denial of permits, march routes, etc.) by the ruling class. Their success, in our view, was measured by their sheer size, where millions took to the streets to demonstrate in life that they represented the vast majority and that the government’s wars, racist and sexist policies did not represent the views of the American people. This exposure of the massive contradiction between what the vast majority demanded and what a capitalist government sought to maintain, served to radicalize an entire generation. It served to break tens of thousands from capitalist politics. It convinced the majority that the government did not represent them and indeed, that they were the legitimate majority on the key issues of the day. It served to flood the ranks of a tiny and isolated socialist left with a new generation of youthful revolutionaries. It broke the hold of the McCarthy era witchhunt and significantly expanded the ranks of revolutionary parties, especially our predecessor party the SWP, which played a leading role in helping to initiate and lead the various independent, mass action, democratically-organized united front mobilizations that dramatically changed public consciousness and, in time, made it impossible for the ruling rich to fully continue its heinous policies.
During those decades organizations like NOW and CLUW (Coalition of Labor Union Women) functioned as democratic, mass action and mass open conference planning organizations that mobilized huge numbers and whose platform speakers always included fighting representatives of the broad left, often including leading revolutionary socialist spokespersons. Mass, open antiwar conferences of 5,000 activists discussed and debated all questions and proceeded to call coordinated demonstrations that mobilized millions.
Today, the ruling class has learned some critical lessons regarding mass actions, first and foremost that they cannot be left to the left alone to organize.
Hence, in literally every critical social arena today we have seen the ruling class and its allied institutions and social forces organize their own mass “protests” to accomplish their ends and to stifle the growth of potentially independent forces that aim to challenge their policies.
Capitalism’s “No Kings Day” disorients major struggles
Today’s “No King’s Day” protests are a prime example. There are few if any exceptions to this phenomenon. We have repeatedly seen essentially Democratic Party-organized mass protests supposedly championing the environment, Chicano/Latinx rights, women’s rights, and opposition to ICE attacks and mass deportations, LGBTQI+ rights, labor rights, and civil rights. But in sharp contrast to decades past, few, if any, of these have been organized by conscious forces outside the Democratic Party. All have been largely devoid of rank-and-file planning, discussion and debate. All have excluded all speakers that challenge ruling class prerogatives. None have fundamentally fostered the growth of revolutionary movements. Indeed, all of the above outcomes have been consciously planned and prepared by the ruling class, more often than not with the aid of the present trade union bureaucracy and various corporate-dominated NGOs.
In nearly every instance all speakers at these mobilizations are open Democrats – elected Democrats, their subordinates or their funded derivative organizations, and again, trade union bureaucrats aligned with the capitalist parties.
Socialist Action’s orientation to the social movements today
Having noted the admittedly difficult state of today’s social movements our orientation remains to the masses of working people in struggle and on the streets, regardless of the momentary hold and organizational control of reformist forces. We are active participants wherever forces are in motion, always seeking to participate, influence rank-and-filers, engage in individual conversations, organize independent contingents where possible, selling our press and distributing our educational flyers. We simultaneously aim to participate in local organizations that occasionally appear that offer opportunities to meet with and engage new activists. Our orientation also includes participation in coalitions that hold out possibilities of independent mass actions, even where these coalitions are initiated by narrow forces with little or no record of past united front-type work.
As with every critical social struggle Socialist Action’s focus, as we actively participate in the antiwar and women’s movements and all others, is to foster the construction of an independent united front-type, democratic, mass action oriented movement in alliance with working class allies and the struggles of the oppressed. We never stand on the sidelines as idle abstentionist critics. Wherever our forces allow, we seek to participate to help independent-minded forces move forward while fully expecting that today’s ever-deepening crises will in time open up qualitatively improved opportunities to advance working class interests.
Erosion of basic democratic rights: Racism and LGBTQI+ discrimination:
That 25 million youth, in the majority people of color, during the blatant police murder of George Floyd and other unarmed Black, Latinx, Native American and other oppressed nationalities, mobilized in 2,000 U.S. cities near the height of the COVID pandemic against what became openly know as society’s systemic racism, that is, a racism inherent in the nature of capitalism itself, gave proof to perhaps the vast majority of the population, that racist oppression is the norm not the exception in the U.S.
That unpunished daily racist police murders of unarmed people of color remains the norm in racist America today has not been obliterated from mass consciousness.
In the face of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and police repression courageous millions took to the streets. The resounding declarations affirming Black Lives Matter! and No Justice, No Peace! reverberated across the world. An unprecedented 84 percent of the U.S. population, according to CNN polls at that time agreed with the anti-racist demonstrators.
It is this systemic racism, not just the police murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks, that infuriated the vast majority and still does. That daily racist police murder of unarmed Blacks has been the norm for decades can no longer be denied with impunity.
Intensified ICE attacks
The same with today’s ICE murders of immigrants and immigrant rights activists facilitated by a broad range of government agencies. Whether it be at U.S. borders, airports, workplaces or simply via government agents of every stripe stopping and/or arresting anyone who they deem looks “suspicious,” the raids and repression have increased to a new intensity. Whatever laws or rules of police or ICE agent conduct are formally adopted – abandoning of masks, mandatory use of cameras, due process, etc. – they are routinely ignored or abandoned as in the name of the increasingly court approved “overriding need” of the cops to “protect themselves and violent protestors.”
Racist cop/ICE systematic violence against immigrants is on a par with Minneapolis a few years ago where twenty percent of the population of 430,000 is Black. When the police employed violence — with kicks, chokeholds, punches, shoves, takedowns, Mace and Tasers — nearly 60 percent of their victims were Black – seven times the rate of whites. Treatment of the Latinx community is little different today.
The objective, as always is to terrorize the oppressed in every form, from discouraging participation in mass protests and union organizing to implementing measures aimed at mass deportation.
Our comrades, especially in the Chicago area, have gained some significant experience in these matters, regularly playing leadership roles in mobilizing capitalism’s immigrant communities and their allies in mass protests.
Capitalism’s racist school-to-prison scenario
Today’s school-to-prison scenario epitomizes capitalist racism and repression. Ever-segregated, underfunded schools in the communities of the poor “graduate” near majorities of functionally illiterate students, channeled into the ever-privatized-for profit mass incarceration prison-industrial-complex to work at Fortune 500 corporations at slave wages rates averaging 50 cents per hour. Half of the incarcerated are people of color. The nation that ranks second in the number of billionaires ranks first in the number and percentage of its population in jail.
The “mis-leadership class”
Meanwhile, the capacity of the present “leadership” of popular movements to turn the deep mass anger and hatred of racist oppression into the electoral arena remains largely unchallenged. The contradiction between the growing mass recognition of the racist, sexist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQI+ nature of U.S. society and the absence of any serious independent organization and leadership resistance, is glaring. Soon after the unprecedented mass mobilization of the Black Lives Matter movement reached its peak the cravenly reformist misleaders proved fully capable of turning the movement into the Democratic Party’s election campaign of the “former” racist politician Joseph Biden, who proceeded to campaign for and win more funding for the police at every level.
Biden proved incapable of implementing any of his campaign promises. His approval ratings were lower than any president in recent memory. Every social movement found itself beleaguered by the Democratic Party machine with empty promises of reform. Biden, whose historic role as the Democrat’s liaison to the racist-segregationist Southern Democrats, claimed to represent a bulwark against the “fascism” emanating from some in the Trump camp!
Student debt
Biden’s incapacity to cancel or significantly reduce the unprecedented debts accumulated by students is yet another example of the system’s bankruptcy. Student debt today exceeds all other personal debts in U.S. society, including the total of all credit card debt and mortgage debt! The average yearly cost of college tuition, room and board in the nation’s private colleges is $52,000, a figure that puts entrance without resort to massive loans, beyond the capacity of all but the top income echelons of U.S. society. [2022 figures] By comparison, many of Europe’s “social democratic” capitalist countries offer major grants or subsidies for higher election that make it accessible to broader layers of the population.
Need we mention that poor revolutionary Cuba, embargoed, blockaded and ever-threatened by U.S.-orchestrated provocations, guarantees universal free education from the cradle to the grave ranking Cuba close to the top of the world in the percentage of its population serving as doctors or with advanced degrees.
Monopolization of the media
The vast majority of all media and communication outlets of every type – newspapers and print media, radio and television, the vast online internet conglomerates – are controlled by a handful of corporate behemoths that overwhelmingly dominate what the vast majority are allowed to see and hear.
We increasingly live in a “Truman Show” [Jim Carrey movie] or Potemkin Village world – an Orwellian-like society saturated every minute by a kept corporate media in all its manifestations, that manufactures and perpetuates the myth of an egalitarian democracy where the people rule and truth is forever prized. The truth lies elsewhere. The U.S. is ruled by an elite few billionaires and their corporate entities whose twin parties periodically spend countless $billions in rigged elections between themselves, from which working people are excluded.
The corporate media monopoly operates to burnish or prettify and deflect capitalism’s horrors, or to ignore or justify them outright. Elon Musk’s $44 billion move to purchase Twitter informs us that the world’s richest men, rule with impunity. To be sure Biden’s IRA (so-called Inflation Reduction Act) included $billions in tax rebates for Musk’s Tesla as it did to other major corporations seeking a U.S.-backed competitive edge on world markets. The IRA also gifted $billions to U.S. battery manufacturers to advantage their operations against China.
Indeed, the longterm goal of the U.S. corporate elite’s 20-year slaughter in Afghanistan was to secure control of that nation’s estimated $2 trillion in lithium and other minerals vital to modern-day industry’s battery production. Need we review all other current and past U.S. wars: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia,….” he list goes on!
The same with Trump’s endless lawsuits against universities and media outlets, all aimed at using his increasing court majorities to line his personal pockets along with those of his allies.
U.S. Spy machine
Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. spies on virtually the entire world, with a surveillance apparatus that is second to none. Snowden’s persecution, as with Julian Assange’s and Chelsea Manning’s, tells us that even the slightest breach of the U.S. mammoth “national security system” will not be tolerated. The recent well-publicized raid on the African People’s Socialist Party informs us that drastic punishment of dissent is not to be discounted when the U.S. ruling class prerogatives are challenged, even on a modest scale. The APSP dared to run a local Florida election campaign that damned the U.S.-initiated war in Ukraine, not to mention a campaign that advocated reparations for U.S. slavery. The FBI press conference announcing the APSP indictment charged that the APSP was acting under the direction of Russian agents. Days later Florida’s rightwing Senator Marco Rubio publically advocated government indictments of a local Cuba solidarity campaign, Brigades of Love, charging that it operated as an agent of the Cuban government. Socialist Action was among the first to come to the defense of the APSP regardless of whatever politics differences we might have.
More recently, Trump announced major government investigations of the “communist” left, including the National Network on Cuba to which Socialist Action is affiliated, and a host of others.
The U.S. military-industrial complex, the “national security state” and capitalism’s broad thought control apparatus
We have written widely about the world predominance of the U.S. military, whose annual $trillion expenditures exceed almost the rest of the world combined. U.S. imperialism is undoubtedly the chief “cop of the world.” Imperialist China, by comparison, has a single military base outside its borders; Russia has six.
But here we focus on other critical arenas where the power of the ruling rich is daily exercised.
The U.S. government’s 18 branches of its $81 billion annually budgeted “U.S. Intelligence Community” includes 1.4 million personnel with top security clearance.
Another 4.25 million “Intelligence Community” employees have some type of special clearance. That’s a total approaching six million people in the U.S. spy business, not to mention the tiny proportion in the business of directly ordering and planning assassinations, kidnappings, death squad murders, covert and overt wars, drone wars, regime change military coups, cyber wars, media disinformation wars, industrial spying wars and all the rest.
This six million-member team has the central assignment of alerting the U.S. ruling class to the most feasible scenarios to defend and advance their claimed economic, political, military and social interests anywhere and everywhere. Wherever countless $millions and $billions and today $trillions can be extracted from the world’s people and nations, U.S. clandestine operatives are on the job.
That journalists like courageous WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is persecuted to the high heavens for revealing just a tiny portion of the secret workings of this comprehensive system of anti-democratic operations, informs us that the ruling class in incapable of tolerating anyone who interferes with its essential operations, not to mention individuals and political parties that aim to build mass organizations of the working class to challenge the system itself and win initial victories along that path.
Revealing the truth about U.S. war crimes around the world, not to mention exercising a journalist’s right to free speech and a free press, is unacceptable to the U.S. imperialist beast, that daily wages wars against poor and oppressed nations around the world. That the single dissident voice of a far off non-U.S. citizen must be silenced forever, informs us of the disgusting arrogance of those who command the seats of U.S. power.
These six million “national security” agents for the capitalist elite are permanently engaged in the various aspects of the spy business. They are complimented in the legislative arena by tens of thousands more who daily pour over every piece of proposed legislation to ensure that the central interests of corporate America and its super rich are assured.
We add to this assemblage of relatively hidden apparatchiks of the capitalist state the employees of the giant media monopolies that dominate what working people are allowed to “learn” about the operations of the system. The same can be said of the tens of thousands of corporate-funded NGOs that largely exist and are funded to lend credence to the status quo.
And then there is the electoral arena, totally dominated by the two-party duopoly, that periodically spends a few “$billion” to try to convince the working class masses that serious choices are to made by casting their votes. Today, the midterm elections are their focus, aimed at perpetuating the myth that the results might well change the course of history.
Finally, we add the police to the institutions that exist to maintain capitalist obedience and control.
This combination of institutionalized capitalist control, in the best of times, functions with little resistance from the working class masses. But when the relative security that the great majority daily experience is called into question this same repressive apparatus will inevitably be called on to exercise force and violence against all those individuals and organizations who set out to seriously challenge the capitalist status quo and, in so doing, aim to win the active support of the vast majority for fundamental change. Winning that vast majority – the tens and hundreds of millions of working people who produce the nation’s wealth and have zero interest in their own exploitation or oppression, is central to the socialist vision of society’s fundamental transformation to a new world of generalized peace, freedom, equality, and the well-being of all.
The fascist option
That Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 coup attempt proved to be a failure was no accident. Trump’s multiple lawsuits and other maneuvers challenging the election results were largely defeated. The real U.S. ruling class, not its titular head of state, had no intention to replacing today’s “bourgeois democracy” with fascist rule. No doubt, in time, the record will show that while Trump pressured the nation’s various repressive agencies, the FBI, CIA, if not the military, to back his coup maneuvers, none expressed any serious interest or intent to follow Trump’s lead. Infatuated with the false notion that as president, his power was virtually unlimited, Trump ran into an impenetrable wall when he posed the prospect of a coup. Not a single serious representative of the capitalist state power followed his lead, from his docile Vice President Michael Pence to the entire array of FBI, CIA and military tops, who drew the line on imposing dictatorial rule.
Needless to say, they were all fully aware that the ruling rich, with myriad connections to the entire repressive establishment, including the military, wanted no part of the “moron” Trump’s coup plans. We use the word moron here in quotation marks as a reminder. Trump’s former and briefly-serving Secretary of State, Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson, used this term to describe Trump following the president’s departure from a National Security Council meeting where the president proposed that the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons arsenal be increased one hundred fold! “He’s a “f_ _ _ _ _ _g moron,” said Tillerson!
There is no doubt that reactionary, bully, misogynist, warmongering bigots like Trump are on the rise across the globe. But none of these ever-threatening reactionary figures are of the true fascist type.
Fascism enters the political scene at a special moment in the course of capitalist crises, first and foremost at a time when revolutionary-led mass working class parties and unions demonstrate the capacity to paralyze capitalist production and pose a threat to the capitalist order itself. Implementing the fascist option, that is, essentially abolishing all traditional electoral/parliamentary forms, requires mass fascist-led armed gangs capable of physically challenging, disrupting, if not murdering working class leaders and destroying their organizations. Hitler’s first and critical acts in this regard focused on the imprisonment, if not mass execution of the chief leaders of Germany’s mass Socialist and Communist Party leaders and the leaders of mass trade unions they headed.
A ruling class decision to pursue this desperate option is always based on its clear understanding that there is no alternative, other than continued chaos, than to physically challenge and annihilate the imminent prospect of working class rule arising from a revolutionary challenge to capitalism itself.
We are far from this point today, although sections of the ruling rich no doubt prefer to at least support nuclei of fascist elements for possible future use.
Fascism’s extra-parliamentary gangs are usually composed of mass petty-bourgeois forces whose ranks have been economically decimated by a deepening capitalist crisis. They also include layers of “de-classed” that is, lumpen workers who a crisis-ridden capitalism has more or less permanently driven from the workforce. And finally, the exercise of the fascist option requires a leadership of fanatics with roots and connections to the capitalist class itself as well as links to forces in the military.
Today, none of these elements clearly exist in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world, although aspects of all or several of them are emerging everywhere. Attacks on immigrants and the LGBTQI+ people are on the rise as is a torrent of reactionary legislation aimed at disenfranchising the oppressed community. Deportations under Biden and Trump have kept pace with, if not exceeded, their predecessors. Demands for “Full amnesty and equal rights for all!” and “No human being is illegal!” have found no takers in the ranks of the Democratic Party.
The capacity of Trump and his supporters to mobilize large crowds of fanatical supporters is on the increase as is his ongoing ability, until recently, to promote electoral victories of his reactionary allies. This informs us that there is an increasing and alarming polarization in U.S. society and beyond with racist scapegoating of immigrants and the most oppressed consciously designed to deflect middle class and working class fears and frustrations over their declining state away from its central cause, the inherent operations of the capitalist state.
To be continued…
