The Class Struggle is Expanding
“[T]he present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, in China's central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.”
Mao (1964). Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan.
The Dialectical Nature of Revolution in a Country of 340 Million People
The recent conflagration in Los Angeles, which has spread throughout the country, has again raised the question of rebellion and revolution in the imperial core. Will the current state of affairs lead to something greater? Is the US population capable of, or willing to, defeat capitalism? In the past, certain nihilistic Marxists have pointed to brief rebellions and their subsequent defeats as evidence of the hopelessness of our circumstances. These individuals completely fail to understand historical and dialectical materialism.
In a country of 340 million people with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $27 trillion, any struggle must be protracted in its scope. Can a full grown redwood tree be chopped down with one swing of the axe? That would be absurd. But some Marxists scoff at every revolutionary conflagration in the US where the proletariat fails to instantly save the day. These people worship spontaneity.
Even in a far less developed country like Czarist Russia, it took decades for revolution to build. In February 1905 Lenin argued that the revolution, which wouldn’t culminate until 1917, had been developing step by step since 1885. In order to determine the dialectical nature of struggle within the U.S., let’s look at the development of the working class struggle in the US over the last 15 years.
Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street was a movement of the working class inspired in large part by the 2008 financial crisis. The Occupy movement did not correctly identify the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Instead it offered a more simplistic and muddled ‘rich versus poor’ analysis which argued that the top one percent of income earners were in opposition to the 99 percent majority. This movement had thousands of people occupy public property for weeks, and general assemblies were held to decide on actions. The movement did not target the means of production directly by occupying work sites, though the energy for sit down strikes was present. Instead, the movement was misled by anarchists who pushed a worship of spontaneity and disorganization (“horizontalism”, “leaderless”, “autonomous”, etc). When the state launched its crackdown, the encampments had no means of defending themselves and no organizational capacity to reconstitute. The movement was broken.
Black Lives Matter
In 2014, triggered by the murders of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown by police and vigilantes, the question of the national oppression of Black Americans was brought back to the forefront. Demonstrations raged with a fury much greater than Occupy — though still lacking articulated proletarian demands. Police across the United States were aghast that they might be portrayed as villains and reacted with a two year long killing spree against Black men and women.
The advent of camera phones and high-speed internet meant that Black people were consuming a steady trauma stream of live murder videos. This only inflamed the demonstrations. In December, after the police officer who killed Michael Brown was set free, a Black man assassinated two NYPD officers in retaliation. In 2015, demonstrations in Baltimore were met with a national guard deployment.
In July of 2016, at the end of a Dallas protest in response to a police murder that had been live-streamed by the victim’s partner, a Black man who had served in the US army reserves shot and killed 5 police officers in a surprise gun battle. After cornering the man in a building the police, terrified and incapable, mounted an explosive to a remote controlled machine and sent it into the shooter’s hiding place, killing him.
The Black Lives Matter protests appeared to die down for several years — seemingly due to exhaustion and directionlessness. Nihilists assumed that the movement would never return. They were proven wrong again in the summer of 2020 when protests over the murder of George Floyd swept across the country. Demonstrators surrounded Minneapolis’ 3rd precinct — the police occupations’ forward operating base where Floyd’s murderer had been stationed. A fierce battle took place over several days and the police were eventually put to flight. The demonstrators seized control of the fortification and set it on fire.
Since the nation’s founding, great rivers of blood have been shed to keep Black people in a position of bondage.
The Black Lives Matter movement, like Occupy before it, failed to accurately explain the class contradiction underlying the struggle. The majority of the working class was unaware that Black people were forced into second class citizenship as a means of holding down wages for all workers and accumulating capital for the bourgeoisie.
Standing Rock
The enslavement of people of African descent was a cornerstone of the development of capitalism in the United States. Equally necessary were the resources which slaves were forced to extract or refine. These resources came from the colonization of the continent facilitated by the genocide of the indigenous population. Like slavery, this process never ended but rather developed into new stages. In 2016, the expression of colonization and genocide came in the form of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a plan to build an oil pipeline underneath the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Hundreds of protesters traveled to Standing Rock and withstood brutal violence by local police and the national guard in an attempt to protect the water supply.
Lessons Learned
Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy proved that the contradictions upon which the US was built — colonization, slavery, and exploitation — had not been resolved. Not only were they unresolved, they were burning like inflamed tissue.
What lagged behind was the class consciousness of the proletariat, a direct result of the near destruction of Marxism-Leninism in the imperial core. Nevertheless, consciousness was growing. The bourgeoisie allowed certain opportunists to run for high office as socialist candidates, demands were made for universal healthcare, and the anemic labor movement began to stir.
In the last two years, due to the rising tide of resistance, as well as genocidal imperialist wars, violent political retaliation by the oppressed has become more commonplace within the imperial core. The working class has become more comfortable openly mocking capitalists and cheering their bloody demise. The capitalist press was forced to spend weeks scolding the masses for their support of Luigi Mangione’s alleged assassination of a health insurance CEO. After Mangione became perhaps the biggest (non-entertainer) celebrity in the county, the press simply declined to cover the killings of other insurance executives.
Advancing the Demands of the Protest Movement
Today, the imperialists face armies outside their gates and insurrectionists within. Iran has been forced to return fire against the insane genocidal Israeli occupation. In Los Angeles and elsewhere, protestors battle the police and national guard to stop the kidnapping of undocumented workers.
There is underway a global insurrection against imperialism, and even the sleeping bear that is the US working class has begun to rouse.
In these circumstances, there is only one thing for communists to do. We must go out amongst the masses, talk to them face-to-face, and explain the underlying class contradictions which drive these current conflicts. Only a communist party can advance the demands of the protest movement. Currently, the working class demands an end to the kidnappings. We must go further and press the demand for amnesty and equal wages for the undocumented. We must advance the tactics of struggle from street demonstrations to mass strikes. We must advance the methods of organization from fragile leaderless movements to powerful councils of the working class.
Dialectics of Class Consciousness
The total size of the US proletariat is in the range of 100 million workers. How long will it take to establish revolutionary consciousness in 100 million workers, or even five million workers — just five percent of that total? In this light, the spontaneous change in class consciousness over the past 15 years is extraordinary. But even with dedicated cadre conducting agitation and propaganda on a daily basis, this struggle will be protracted.
“The enemy is strong and we are weak, and the danger of subjugation is there. But in other respects the enemy has shortcomings and we have advantages. The enemy's advantage can be reduced and his shortcomings aggravated by our efforts. On the other hand, our advantages can be enhanced and our shortcoming remedied by our efforts. Hence, we can win final victory and avert subjugation, while the enemy will ultimately be defeated and will be unable to avert the collapse of his whole imperialist system.”
Mao (1938). On Protracted War.
Agitating People out of Complacency
During prolonged periods of hardship and trauma, humans have a tendency to adapt by going into a state of denial. They minimize the horror they are going through and rationalize their difficulties as an unavoidable part of human life. Our party has already encountered workers who view their lack of job security, low pay, exhausting schedules, minimal health coverage, high rents, and overcrowded housing as perfectly normal.
This may be an effective survival strategy when there is no hope of change. But when faced with an oppressor who can be defeated, these instincts lead to nihilism, apathy, and complacency which puts millions of lives at risk.
Cadre must be fierce in our rejection of such nihilism. An unpleasant task has been tossed at our feet – to violently shake the proletariat out of its complacency. We cannot hesitate for even an instant in accepting this burden. In our agitprop work, if we truly care about the proletariat, we will confront them with the harshness of the truth, do battle with bourgeois illusions, and make clear that revolutionary struggle is our only means of survival.
My hope is that the foregoing analysis has convinced communists of the necessity of putting all of their effort into conducting agitation and propaganda amongst the working class.