"Shall Not Perish From The Earth"
By Malcolm Martin
03/01/08 "ICH" -- - The people of the United States are
struggling with a marked escalation of the class war. Maybe
no one has a firm grip on "what is to be done?", to borrow
Lenin's phraseology. But it is for sure a time to reject
fatalism, defeatism, nihilism and any other current which
involves the people in rolling over to die quietly.
If Karl Marx was right, we have reached the end times not of
humanity but of the capitalist economic system. It is a time
when the working class was, through its collective
discipline and might, supposed to conduct and win a war with
the bourgeoisie and establish its rule. Then the building of
socialism was to commence. War, racism and poverty would be
banished in the ensuing years along with all of capitalism's
pathological influences on man.
What are the prospects for this scenario? However likely or
remote, the idea should not be given up on because the other
choices are too horrific to passively accept--the Orwellian
state, bands of survivalists roaming a scorched landscape,
the extinction of the human being.
So it comes down to a must win for the working class and its
allies among the petty bourgeois over the capitalist ruling
class and its allies among the petty bourgeois (those among
the intelligentsia that spread hopelessness and confusion
among working people for 30 pieces of silver).
There are, it seems, two loci of power in the ruling class.
First are members of the class based on the ownership of the
means of production--the financiers, the industrialist, and
the other human repositories of massive wealth (Gates,
Cheney, Paulson, the Bush Family, the Walton Family...).
Then there is the military high command, the last card in
the capitalist deck, without which, the civilian side of the
ruling class is essentially powerless once their economic
superstructure collapses.
An important question would seem to be, what is the
potential for splitting the not wealthy military top brass
from their masters? The rank-and-file soldier has already
been deemed unreliable and so the formation and building of
Blackwater, a private bourgeois shadow army. It's possible
that rather than writing the bourgeoisie's errand boys in
the Congress we should try to reach Petraeus, Fallon,
Mullen, Odierno, Powell, Wilkerson and others and remind
them of Cheney's five Vietnam deferments before they
acquiesce in his commands to the brigade shipping from Iraq
in October to serve as "an on-call federal response force
for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including
terrorist attacks" here inside the United States.
Meanwhile, on our side of the class struggle, there is
admittedly no US political party or other formation which
expresses the destiny of the working class to power and
socialism. Class consciousness would seem to be an
endangered sentiment. But think about it, would not the
United States be the last place where a consciousness of
themselves as a class would seize the minds of working
people? That's what empire, that's what imperialism, that's
what racism functions to do.
Class consciousness can develop very quickly in a people
though! It is on the rise in the US right now in the
reaction to the proposed Wall Street bailout. It will
accelerate as the material cocoon provided by the world's
dominant economy wears out.
Workers, united across all artificial boundaries created by
capitalism, whether nation, race, sex, or religion are the
only hope now. This is the only force capable of staying the
hand of the bourgeoisie and insuring the human experiment
"shall not perish from the earth", to borrow Lincoln's
phraseology.
In your circle, however large or small that may be, in
everything you write and say, draw the boundary lines
clearly for people between the opposing forces in this final
class war. Don't confuse them with Democrats and
Republicans. The ruling class is wealthy, we work for a
living. Build our forces by raising class consciousness and
giving every worker the best chance of making the right
decisions in the battles just over the horizon now.
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