Jay Rothermel
24th November 2008, 16:00
The Militant
Vol. 72/No. 47 December 1, 2008
‘Socialism in United States is
not only possible, but necessary’
New Venezuelan release of ‘Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible?’
presented at 2008 Venezuela International Book Fair
(feature article)
The following remarks were presented by Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and president of Pathfinder Press, at a November 14 panel discussion held in Caracas during the fourth Venezuela International Book Fair. The panel celebrated publication of a Spanish-language edition of the pamphlet Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by the Venezuelan publisher Monte Avila.
The talk by Waters is copyright © 2008 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
First, a thank you to all the panelists for their remarks—to José [González] from the ALBA Cultural Fund, Erick [Rangel] from the national leadership team of the PSUV youth, and Carolina [Alvarez], editorial director of Monte Avila.
On behalf of Pathfinder Press, I above all want to express our appreciation to Monte Avila for the decision—as Carolina described—to publish Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? in not one but two editions for the 2008 Venezuela International Book Fair. One edition to be distributed free to book fair participants here tomorrow, and the other to be sold across the country over the coming year through the Librerías del Sur chain of bookstores.
I also want to thank CENAL, the National Book Center and organizer of the Venezuela International Book Fair, for the important initiative its national leadership took last year in organizing the fair’s Central Forum on the theme of “The United States: A possible revolution.” As you have already learned, that was the origin of the talk that is at the center of the booklet Pathfinder and Monte Avila are jointly presenting here.
It is not by accident that one of the leading daily newspapers in the United States, the New York Times, just this week disparagingly singled out that forum by name as an example of how divorced from reality all you here in Venezuela are. How divorced from reality all revolutionary-minded workers are, everywhere. That we should think such a ridiculous proposition worth discussing! That we should think events like the Venezuela International Book Fair, events that promote reading and culture and civil debate among working people, point the way forward for humanity.
As we said last year, however, the question of whether socialist revolution is possible in the U.S. is no small matter. Its “answer, in practice, will ultimately determine the future of humanity—or more accurately, perhaps, whether there is a future for humanity.”
A way to ‘manage’ capitalism?
What most struck me in rereading the pamphlet was the list of assumptions one would have to make to reach the conclusion that socialist revolution in the U.S. is not possible. And then thinking about what has transpired in the world in just one year’s time!
“To reach that conclusion,” we said, you would have to believe that there won’t again be economic, financial, or social crises on the order of those that marked the first half of the twentieth century. That the ruling families of the imperialist world and their economic wizards have found a way to ‘manage’ capitalism so as to preclude shattering financial crises that could lead to something akin to the Great Depression….
You would have to be convinced that competition among the imperialist rivals, as well as between them and the more economically advanced semicolonial powers, is diminishing and that their profit rates…are now going to begin to rise….
A year ago when we were discussing these questions here in Caracas, the main U.S. stock market index, just a few weeks earlier, had closed at its all-time high of a little over 14,000. Yesterday it swung wildly by almost a thousand points, from under 8,000—more than 40 percent below its peak—to close at almost 9,000. These manic fluctuations have become so much a daily occurrence as to become commonplace. And everyone knows they simply announce another plunge. Trillions of dollars of what Marx called “fictitious capital” have disappeared in the last year, and the bottom is nowhere in sight—nowhere.
What seemingly started as a capitalist crisis centered in credit and banking has now been revealed to be something of a very different dimension. As the de facto bankruptcy of General Motors bears witness, the deepest contraction of industrial production and employment since the opening decades of the last century is accelerating dramatically. And the inevitability of such a contraction has underlaid this worldwide crisis from the beginning.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the Great Depression of the 1930s wasn’t the consequence of the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent banking crises alone. Its roots are found in the violently intensifying competition among capitalist powers in the years leading up to World War I—for colonial possessions, access to markets and raw materials, and inexpensive sources of labor to exploit—and the economic and social breakdowns and financial catastrophe that accompanied that bloody interimperialist slaughter and its aftermath. And it took the global carnage of the Second World War, with its massive physical destruction of capital across Europe and Asia from 1939 to 1945, to lay the basis for the exploiting classes to pull out of that crisis.
That is important. As Lenin stressed, there is no hopeless situation for capitalism. As the two decades from 1930 to 1950 proved once again, the finance capitalists, if they are not stopped beforehand, can dig themselves out of any crisis—by inflicting enough bloody defeats on the working classes and destroying enough of the world’s existing industrial capacity.
The only question is the price the toilers will be made to pay.
The only solution is taking the power to inflict these horrors—state power—out of their hands, once and for all.
The road forced upon us
Is that possible? That is, after all, the question we posed a year ago. And we made the point that revolutionary struggles by the toilers are not only inevitable, they will be initiated at first not by us, “but forced upon us by the crisis-driven assaults of the propertied classes.”
The working class in massive numbers never enters on the road of revolutionary struggle lightly, or all at once. Workers sense the stakes, the sacrifices it will entail, the uncertainty. Our class in its majority exhausts other alternatives first, including alternatives to communist political leadership.
Within the United States and around the world, for example, illusions in the newly elected president of the greatest imperialist empire in history are enormous. But one must be blind to history to think that Barack Obama—now the chief executive-elect of what Marx and Engels called the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”—can or wants to do anything other than serve the interests of the U.S. ruling class. Of the propertied rulers who cold-bloodedly selected him as the best man for the job right now.
Even before the new stage of the global retrenchment that is now accelerating, however, we have already seen, already been part of, the opening skirmishes of a fighting vanguard of the working class emerging in the United States. We saw this vanguard-in-becoming as millions of workers took to the streets of cities and towns across the country in 2006 and 2007 to demand the legalization of some 12 million immigrants whose documents the U.S. government does not recognize. They retook May Day as a fighting holiday of the working class.
We saw it earlier this year in the defiant response of workers across the Midwest—both immigrant and U.S.-born—to police raids on factories and homes, the roundups and deportations of thousands of workers, the criminal charges of “identity theft” brought against hundreds. That fighting response was captured most dramatically by the women, together with their children, who led the protest marches, proudly displaying the electronic police monitors shackled around their ankles. It was registered by the workers of all nationalities who joined them.
This is a working-class vanguard strengthened by its increasingly international character, by the traditions of struggle being added by workers from around the world to the longtime traditions of working-class battles in the United States itself. This is a working class that is slowly but surely learning in struggle the life-or-death necessity of fighting shoulder to shoulder—as well as how to do so.
The rapidly escalating economic and social crisis has only barely begun to be felt by working people, whether in the United States or internationally. While home foreclosures have been climbing over the past year, reaching more than one million in 2008 alone, it is only in the last months that the factory closings and layoffs have begun to accelerate.
Just last week the DHL courier service shut down domestic service in North America, resulting in the layoff of more than 7,000 workers in the industrial belt of southern Ohio, with spreading repercussions for working people from Cincinnati to Dayton to Columbus. General Motors and other automobile companies are pushing thousands onto the streets, and thousands more auto and auto parts workers all over the country, and indeed all over the world, will follow in the months ahead. Yahoo, the internet company, is laying off 10 percent of its workforce worldwide. Monster banks are slashing their workforces. And you can multiply those examples many-fold.
The majority—both in the United States and beyond, including here in Venezuela—still live with the grim hope that maybe the slump really won’t get so bad, perhaps its worst possibilities will bypass our lands. But world capitalism in crisis will not spare the most vulnerable.
A fight for political clarity
I want to close by emphasizing one point.
Our job today is above all a political one. While the class battles ahead of us are inevitable, their outcome is not. That depends on us. On our capacity to unflinchingly face the truth and speak with clarity to fellow combatants, to learn to rely on our own increasing class solidarity and unity in struggle. To understand, and help other vanguard fighters to understand, that the driving force of all history since the dawn of recorded time has been class struggle, not conspiracies. That the poisons of Jew-hatred and racism rob us of our ability to see that the real problem is the capitalist system itself, and that the real enemy we must defeat is the propertied classes whose wealth and power depend on that system.
Working people the world over are in for decades of intertwined economic, military, social, and political crises, and their accompanying explosive class battles. The period we are entering will be more akin to the years from the opening of the twentieth century through World War II than to anything any of us have lived through. The one thing we can be sure of is that our side, our class, will have more than one opportunity to alter the course of history in the only way we can—the way the workers and farmers of Cuba did it fifty years ago, and the way the working people of the tsarist empire did it four decades before.
That’s why the continuing example of the Cuban Revolution is so important today. And, I would add, it’s why the fight to free the five heroes of the Cuban Revolution—who, against their will and ours, have been serving on the front lines of the class struggle in the United States for more than ten years now—is an international battle of the first order. All these are among the real questions in front of us. For the opportunity to address them, and to join in the debate over them, both this year and last, we express our thanks, our respect, and our class solidarity.
Vol. 72/No. 47 December 1, 2008
‘Socialism in United States is
not only possible, but necessary’
New Venezuelan release of ‘Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible?’
presented at 2008 Venezuela International Book Fair
(feature article)
The following remarks were presented by Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and president of Pathfinder Press, at a November 14 panel discussion held in Caracas during the fourth Venezuela International Book Fair. The panel celebrated publication of a Spanish-language edition of the pamphlet Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by the Venezuelan publisher Monte Avila.
The talk by Waters is copyright © 2008 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
First, a thank you to all the panelists for their remarks—to José [González] from the ALBA Cultural Fund, Erick [Rangel] from the national leadership team of the PSUV youth, and Carolina [Alvarez], editorial director of Monte Avila.
On behalf of Pathfinder Press, I above all want to express our appreciation to Monte Avila for the decision—as Carolina described—to publish Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? in not one but two editions for the 2008 Venezuela International Book Fair. One edition to be distributed free to book fair participants here tomorrow, and the other to be sold across the country over the coming year through the Librerías del Sur chain of bookstores.
I also want to thank CENAL, the National Book Center and organizer of the Venezuela International Book Fair, for the important initiative its national leadership took last year in organizing the fair’s Central Forum on the theme of “The United States: A possible revolution.” As you have already learned, that was the origin of the talk that is at the center of the booklet Pathfinder and Monte Avila are jointly presenting here.
It is not by accident that one of the leading daily newspapers in the United States, the New York Times, just this week disparagingly singled out that forum by name as an example of how divorced from reality all you here in Venezuela are. How divorced from reality all revolutionary-minded workers are, everywhere. That we should think such a ridiculous proposition worth discussing! That we should think events like the Venezuela International Book Fair, events that promote reading and culture and civil debate among working people, point the way forward for humanity.
As we said last year, however, the question of whether socialist revolution is possible in the U.S. is no small matter. Its “answer, in practice, will ultimately determine the future of humanity—or more accurately, perhaps, whether there is a future for humanity.”
A way to ‘manage’ capitalism?
What most struck me in rereading the pamphlet was the list of assumptions one would have to make to reach the conclusion that socialist revolution in the U.S. is not possible. And then thinking about what has transpired in the world in just one year’s time!
“To reach that conclusion,” we said, you would have to believe that there won’t again be economic, financial, or social crises on the order of those that marked the first half of the twentieth century. That the ruling families of the imperialist world and their economic wizards have found a way to ‘manage’ capitalism so as to preclude shattering financial crises that could lead to something akin to the Great Depression….
You would have to be convinced that competition among the imperialist rivals, as well as between them and the more economically advanced semicolonial powers, is diminishing and that their profit rates…are now going to begin to rise….
A year ago when we were discussing these questions here in Caracas, the main U.S. stock market index, just a few weeks earlier, had closed at its all-time high of a little over 14,000. Yesterday it swung wildly by almost a thousand points, from under 8,000—more than 40 percent below its peak—to close at almost 9,000. These manic fluctuations have become so much a daily occurrence as to become commonplace. And everyone knows they simply announce another plunge. Trillions of dollars of what Marx called “fictitious capital” have disappeared in the last year, and the bottom is nowhere in sight—nowhere.
What seemingly started as a capitalist crisis centered in credit and banking has now been revealed to be something of a very different dimension. As the de facto bankruptcy of General Motors bears witness, the deepest contraction of industrial production and employment since the opening decades of the last century is accelerating dramatically. And the inevitability of such a contraction has underlaid this worldwide crisis from the beginning.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the Great Depression of the 1930s wasn’t the consequence of the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent banking crises alone. Its roots are found in the violently intensifying competition among capitalist powers in the years leading up to World War I—for colonial possessions, access to markets and raw materials, and inexpensive sources of labor to exploit—and the economic and social breakdowns and financial catastrophe that accompanied that bloody interimperialist slaughter and its aftermath. And it took the global carnage of the Second World War, with its massive physical destruction of capital across Europe and Asia from 1939 to 1945, to lay the basis for the exploiting classes to pull out of that crisis.
That is important. As Lenin stressed, there is no hopeless situation for capitalism. As the two decades from 1930 to 1950 proved once again, the finance capitalists, if they are not stopped beforehand, can dig themselves out of any crisis—by inflicting enough bloody defeats on the working classes and destroying enough of the world’s existing industrial capacity.
The only question is the price the toilers will be made to pay.
The only solution is taking the power to inflict these horrors—state power—out of their hands, once and for all.
The road forced upon us
Is that possible? That is, after all, the question we posed a year ago. And we made the point that revolutionary struggles by the toilers are not only inevitable, they will be initiated at first not by us, “but forced upon us by the crisis-driven assaults of the propertied classes.”
The working class in massive numbers never enters on the road of revolutionary struggle lightly, or all at once. Workers sense the stakes, the sacrifices it will entail, the uncertainty. Our class in its majority exhausts other alternatives first, including alternatives to communist political leadership.
Within the United States and around the world, for example, illusions in the newly elected president of the greatest imperialist empire in history are enormous. But one must be blind to history to think that Barack Obama—now the chief executive-elect of what Marx and Engels called the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”—can or wants to do anything other than serve the interests of the U.S. ruling class. Of the propertied rulers who cold-bloodedly selected him as the best man for the job right now.
Even before the new stage of the global retrenchment that is now accelerating, however, we have already seen, already been part of, the opening skirmishes of a fighting vanguard of the working class emerging in the United States. We saw this vanguard-in-becoming as millions of workers took to the streets of cities and towns across the country in 2006 and 2007 to demand the legalization of some 12 million immigrants whose documents the U.S. government does not recognize. They retook May Day as a fighting holiday of the working class.
We saw it earlier this year in the defiant response of workers across the Midwest—both immigrant and U.S.-born—to police raids on factories and homes, the roundups and deportations of thousands of workers, the criminal charges of “identity theft” brought against hundreds. That fighting response was captured most dramatically by the women, together with their children, who led the protest marches, proudly displaying the electronic police monitors shackled around their ankles. It was registered by the workers of all nationalities who joined them.
This is a working-class vanguard strengthened by its increasingly international character, by the traditions of struggle being added by workers from around the world to the longtime traditions of working-class battles in the United States itself. This is a working class that is slowly but surely learning in struggle the life-or-death necessity of fighting shoulder to shoulder—as well as how to do so.
The rapidly escalating economic and social crisis has only barely begun to be felt by working people, whether in the United States or internationally. While home foreclosures have been climbing over the past year, reaching more than one million in 2008 alone, it is only in the last months that the factory closings and layoffs have begun to accelerate.
Just last week the DHL courier service shut down domestic service in North America, resulting in the layoff of more than 7,000 workers in the industrial belt of southern Ohio, with spreading repercussions for working people from Cincinnati to Dayton to Columbus. General Motors and other automobile companies are pushing thousands onto the streets, and thousands more auto and auto parts workers all over the country, and indeed all over the world, will follow in the months ahead. Yahoo, the internet company, is laying off 10 percent of its workforce worldwide. Monster banks are slashing their workforces. And you can multiply those examples many-fold.
The majority—both in the United States and beyond, including here in Venezuela—still live with the grim hope that maybe the slump really won’t get so bad, perhaps its worst possibilities will bypass our lands. But world capitalism in crisis will not spare the most vulnerable.
A fight for political clarity
I want to close by emphasizing one point.
Our job today is above all a political one. While the class battles ahead of us are inevitable, their outcome is not. That depends on us. On our capacity to unflinchingly face the truth and speak with clarity to fellow combatants, to learn to rely on our own increasing class solidarity and unity in struggle. To understand, and help other vanguard fighters to understand, that the driving force of all history since the dawn of recorded time has been class struggle, not conspiracies. That the poisons of Jew-hatred and racism rob us of our ability to see that the real problem is the capitalist system itself, and that the real enemy we must defeat is the propertied classes whose wealth and power depend on that system.
Working people the world over are in for decades of intertwined economic, military, social, and political crises, and their accompanying explosive class battles. The period we are entering will be more akin to the years from the opening of the twentieth century through World War II than to anything any of us have lived through. The one thing we can be sure of is that our side, our class, will have more than one opportunity to alter the course of history in the only way we can—the way the workers and farmers of Cuba did it fifty years ago, and the way the working people of the tsarist empire did it four decades before.
That’s why the continuing example of the Cuban Revolution is so important today. And, I would add, it’s why the fight to free the five heroes of the Cuban Revolution—who, against their will and ours, have been serving on the front lines of the class struggle in the United States for more than ten years now—is an international battle of the first order. All these are among the real questions in front of us. For the opportunity to address them, and to join in the debate over them, both this year and last, we express our thanks, our respect, and our class solidarity.