The American crossroads and the tasks of revolutionaries in the situation

USA – New phase of the crisis

The American crossroads and the tasks of revolutionaries in the situation

Masses, 32^th year, n. 615 – August 2, 2020.

On July 25, protests against police violence and racism resumed, two months after George Floyd’s death. During that period, clashes between protesters and police forces occurred in dozens of cities. In Austin (Texas), a protester was murdered by a driver. In Portland (Oregon) and Seattle (Washington), there were clashes between protesters and repressive forces. On the same day, thousands of workers crossed their arms in memory of the murdered.

The cyclical resumption of the demonstrations, however, does not alter the general course of the movement’s regression. There was no way for the movement to continue its upward cycle, without converging and strengthening itself with the course of the strikes struggle. Since March, there have been hundreds, strikes that have exploded across the country, covering strategic branches of large industry, transport and commerce. Fundamentally, they instinctively converged to raise demands common to all strikers (increase in wages, biosecurity conditions in the tasks performed, resistance to dismissals, etc.). There has also been a tendency to form committees to discuss working conditions and biosafety in the automotive and food industry, which soon gained accession in other branches of production. Other sectors of the exploited follow the same path of self-organization, in defense of their conditions of existence. This is the case with the various movements of tenants, who have been blocking homes, threatened with eviction. Or with teachers and professors from the state of California, who called for strikes, with street demonstrations against returning to school.

This is the material and objective basis of a wide national front unit in defense of the life of the masses. However, these tendencies come up against the strong control of the union bureaucracy; as well as in the ascendancy of religious leaders and liberal and reformist politicians, in the movement against police racism and violence.

That is why, despite the fact that countless of the workers’ strikes managed to break the paralysis of their leaderships, and that the democratic movement of the masses stood out for their radicalization, they found themselves orphans of a leadership that supported itself in the tendencies of struggle, and projected them politically in a broad unitary and national movement, of the exploited and oppressed. So that the movement against police violence and racism ended up emptying and focusing on the action of some groups, such as “Not Fucking Around Coalition”, a black people militia who stand up for self-defense in the face of white supremacist militias.

It is against the backdrop of this process that a new phase of inter-bourgeois struggle has opened, marked, now, by the interests of the two major parties of the order, with the intensification of electoral campaigns. Democrats took the lead in the dismantling of the movement, promising reforms in the police apparatus, and a solution to the grave situation of the masses, removing Trump from state command. The democratic illusions present among the masses and the Democrats’ control over the corrupt union leaderships favor the offensive to block the instinctive tendencies of the masses, and channel the popular revolt to the bourgeois exit from the crisis.

The elections are presented by the Democrats as a solution to the mass revolt, which clashes with the Trump administration, especially because of their inability to stop the social and human tragedies that result from the worsening of the pandemic across the country. The majority of the population (67%) rated Trump’s measures and policies during the health crisis as very negative. In addition, 60% consider the economic management as terrible.

It is on the basis of these indicators that Democrats are gaining ground. Election polls show that Trump could lose the election. It also favors Biden, a broad campaign of so-called “opinion groups” and influential politicians from the Republican Party, like The Lincoln Project, created in December 2019, which, publicly, work for the victory of the Democratic candidate. Part of this movement is the website “Republican Voters Against Trump”, aiming to denounce the reasons for his break with the president, and to gather donations of millions of dollars, against his reelection. Even financier Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director, formed an “anti-Trump group”, the Right Side PAC. However, the internal fissures in the Republican Party are not reflected – at least for now – as erosion of Trump’s electoral base, formed by the gigantic mass of the white petty bourgeoisie, which populates the interior of the states.

The movements demonstrate that fractions of the American imperialist bourgeoisie recognize in Biden an instrument of their interests. It is not by chance that the Democratic candidate is the one who best defended the interests of police corporations. Regarding foreign policy, he declared himself against the withdrawal of American troops, and defended that the blockade on Venezuela and Cuba continue. He is in favor of maintaining the offensive in Syria and Afghanistan. And he openly defends trade war and the militarization of relations with China and Russia. Finally: he defends the parasitic, bellicist and violent methods of the American monopoly bourgeoisie, in order to maintain its worldwide supremacy, although covering himself with the “multilateralist” and “democratic” mask.

This is so true that the Republican groups and politicians themselves, who support Biden against Trump, recognize that they would not do so if Bernie Sanders were the Democratic candidate. Evidently, Sanders poses no real danger to bourgeois interests. However, their rejection between Republicans and Democrats exposes to daylight the deep rejection of the American bourgeoisie to follow the path of any reform, however limited, that may stop its offensive against the lives of the masses and the oppressed nations.

However, the fierce resistance of the Trump administration, which still handles important levers of the state, and uses them according to its interests, must still be overcome. This is what can be observed with the decision to send federal police forces to intervene in the repression of movements, in states and cities governed by Democrats. That is why the city of Portland, Oregon, which enacted a law to limit deterrent weaponry against demonstrations (rubber bullets, tear gas, etc.), was militarized by federal agents from the Interior Department (DHS), police border patrol, and judicial police (Marshalls), under direct orders from the Trump administration. Without identification, they took direct responsibility for policing and suppressing demonstrations, overriding the decisions of the mayor, Ted Wheeler. They carry out arbitrary arrests, and keep dozens of protesters illegally detained. One protester, Donovan LaBella, suffered a fractured skull after being shot in the head. Wheeler began to demand the withdrawal of forces, while the governor – Democrat – characterized the federal forces as “occupation troops”.

Trump refused, and accused the Democratic mayor and governor of being unable to end the demonstrations. And he threatened other Democratic-governed cities and states to undergo intervention by federal forces (Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Detroit). As can be seen, the Trumpist electoral offensive acquires dictatorial contours, as Biden expands his advantage (40.1%, against 48.7%, in voting intentions). Such advantages are decisive in the main electoral districts, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona and Florida. Fundamentally, among blacks, Latinos, young people, women and white voters with university studies. While Trump maintains his ancestry among the white electorate, with no university studies, and men.

The essence of this process is that the political impasse, opened by the crisis, is gradually finding its bourgeois mainstay, favoring the maneuvers of preserving bourgeois governability, at a time convulsive for the American monopoly bourgeoisie. The class-conscious avant-garde must work to show the masses that Biden’s victory over Trump will not change the tendency for capitalism to disintegrate the world’s greatest power, to make greater sacrifice of the exploited, and to advance the repression of the class struggle.

For the American proletariat and oppressed masses to take a leap forward in their independent organization and political conscience, it must be understood that, whatever the bourgeois government on duty, it will base the promised “economic recovery” (that is, the resumption of monopoly profits) in the sacrifice of the workers and other wage earners, as well as the world.

The combination of the economic and health crisis, with more than 120 thousand deaths, and 2.3 million infected by Covid-19, with the more 30 million unemployed, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of companies (industrial, commercial, services , etc.), with the reduction of wages, and the financial insolvency of wide sectors of the middle classes, among other manifestations of social barbarism, which is spreading in the main capitalist power, prevent the class struggle from being interrupted due to elections and exchange of government.

The uprising of the masses against police violence and racism, and the workers’ strikes, brought to the surface the social forces, which will allow us to weld the democratic struggles against discrimination, with the struggle for the general demands that unify white and black exploited against the parasitic white bourgeoisie , racist and brutal. The American proletarian vanguard is facing a favorable situation to build the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist party, as part of the reconstruction of the World Party of the Socialist Revolution.