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Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Time for a Worker Party in the USA?


That is what In Defense of Marxism and their friends of Socialist Appeal believe: that time is ripe for a mass party of Labor [at IDOM, at SA]. Hence they have launched the Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor.

It is difficult to judge from the distance but when I see stuff like what is happening to the working class and in general all residents in the Gulf of Mexico with the US government (a Democrat government that raised mass support in the last elections!) as corrupt and detached from its own people as to let them be poisoned and their whole social and environmental fabric destroyed only to help Big Oil corporations and how this big lie (added to the others) is slowly raising awareness and what is still powerless rage but can easily become in powerful collective action and organization, I'd dare say that they may well be right.

It is surely too early to plan or even dream of a revolution taking place in the USA. Class consciousness, while growing, is still too diffuse and Big Capital really seems in power, if not really anymore in control of the situation. But it is certainly the kind of context that strongly calls for sowing the seeds and nurturing the saplings that one day soon may become the forces driving such a necessary change ahead.
The situation is certainly ripe, in the USA, in Europe and probably in many other places for the formation and/or strengthening of the instruments of class struggle and eventually class power: true total democracy.

This context
was addressed quite well by Alan Woods recently: while the unions would want "social peace" and negotiate some sort of inter-classes sharing of wealth and living conditions, as was possible to some extent in the past (only in the developed world), this is not possible in the current conditions of radical adjustment that Capitalism is going through. In the present context and for the foreseeable future, Capital will only be able (and willing) to squeeze more and more, without any compassion, the working classes in order to foot the bill of their luxurious lifestyle and wealth-based power structure.

However I do not know if this appeal is "the right one", that's up to you to judge, or even if the Marxist-Leninist concept of political organization makes any sense in the context of Late Capitalism (Toyotism). I do agree although with the consideration that unions should have a central role however and that, ideally at least, the class organization should be one. Albeit one radically democratic.

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