2. Organizational Campaigns
In the industrial capitalist countries, the monopoly bourgeoisie manages to stay as the ruling class and control the state for its own purposes, whether there is a duopoly of the Republican and Democratic parties as in the presidential form of government of the United States or an oligopoly of parties as in the parliamentary forms of Europe and Japan. There are variations among the so-called mainstream parties but they are all within the predetermined framework or confines of the monopoly capitalist state system. In the semi-feudal neocolonies, the joint ruling classes of the big compradors and landlords likewise maintain a variety of political parties to conjure the illusion of democracy. These parties are required to stay within the bounds of the big comprador-landlord political system.
The ruling bourgeois class can tolerate a working class party if it does not challenge the state system of bourgeois rule and seeks reforms exclusively within the framework of bourgeois law and order. It takes every effort to induce and persuade a working class party to stay within the bounds of bourgeois rule. But it does not hesitate to use the coercive apparatuses of the state to malign and suppress the working class party when this is deemed as a threat to the system for seeking to supplant the class rule of the bourgeoisie with that of the working class in order to establish an anti-imperialist or socialist state..
At any rate, there is the need for a working class party to lead the people in seeking basic reforms within the bourgeois political system or in seeking to replace this with the socialist system. Basic social reforms as well as social revolution are not possible without the working class party that is capable of leading the organized and unorganized masses. Without such a working class party, the big bourgeoisie continues to rule society unchallenged and unhampered through the political parties which it uses for preserving the system, for intra-class and intra-systemic competition for political power among the bourgeois factions and for warding off any political party that seeks to overthrow bourgeois rule.
There must be a trustworthy working class party committed to the propagation and realization of the program of social change and capable of leading the broad masses of the people, especially the working people. Such a party is best relied upon for confronting the global financial and economic crisis and solving the problems for the benefit of the people and with their active participation. Without a working class party, the bourgeois parties would prevail over the working people who are unorganized and spontaneous or who are limited to mass organizations.
In carrying out organizational campaigns in the face of the current grave financial and economic crisis, efforts must be resolutely undertaken to build a genuine working class party that surpasses the bourgeois laborite, reformist social democratic or revisionist communist parties. Building such a working class party is quite challenging because of the long running attempts of the monopoly bourgeoisie to stigmatize as “terrorist” revolutionary forces that call for national liberation, democracy and socialism. But the current crisis conditions are favorable for building such a party.
The trade unions and other mass organizations must be built in order to uphold, defend and promote the rights and interests of the exploited classes and sectors of society. In the industrial capitalist countries, the most important of these are the mass organizations of workers, migrant workers, immigrants, the various nationalities, youth, women, the professionals and cultural workers. In the semi-feudal neocolonies, the most important mass organizations are those of workers, peasants, youth, women, the intelligentsia and the minorities. These classes or sectors are adversely affected by the crisis in particular ways.
The class and sectoral mass organizations must further form multi-class and multi-sectoral federations and alliances in order to underscore common interests and build political unity cumulatively and progressively. The genuine working class party offers to them as guide its general line and program of action, encourages their political and organizational initiatives and thereby wins their abiding support .Mass organizations with different ideological, political and religious affinities can form formal and informal alliances to pursue common courses of action on the basis of consensus and coordination.
Within a country, mass formations can be established and developed at various levels, from the basic level through intermediate levels to the national level. These mass formations can in turn become components of similar formations at the international level. The International League of Peoples’ Struggle has been working hard to build its national chapters and its global region committees. It is a form of international alliance but is ever ready and willing to form broader alliances along the anti-imperialist and democratic line of people’s struggle.
3. Mass mobilizations
In connection with information and educational campaigns and organizational campaigns, the broad masses of the people in their millions must be mobilized to denounce the exploitative and oppressive character of the system of monopoly capitalism, now sharper and more destructive than ever before, and to demand social, economic and political changes, ranging from basic reforms to the fundamental revolutionary transformation of society.
The battle for democracy must be carried out according to the objective and subjective conditions obtaining. The legal forms of struggle must be carried out where these are possible and to whatever extent these are possible. The full spectrum of human rights, civil, political, social, economic and cultural, must be upheld, defended and advanced for the benefit of the exploited and oppressed people. The people must be able to act accordingly as the socio-economic crisis results in political crisis and the forces and agents of monopoly capitalism malign and try to discredit democratic protest as unlawful rebellion or even as terrorism and thus justify increased political repression.
In countries where the ruling classes engage in state terrorism and/or imperialism engages in wars of aggression and military intervention, the people have the sovereign right to mobilize themselves for all forms of resistance, including revolutionary armed struggle. At the moment, legal mass movements and revolutionary armed struggles are going on and advancing in several countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the people are the most oppressed and exploited. The current severity of the global financial and economic crisis, the exacerbation of exploitation and oppression, the blatant political repression or naked state terrorism and the imperialist wars of aggression impel the people to wage armed revolution.
(Bulatlat.com)
To become most effective in making protests and demands, the mass movement for social change must be based at the level of the local communities, the factories, farms, schools and churches. It is indestructible when there are dedicated activists of the working class party and the mass organizations who are deeply rooted among the toiling masses and who arouse, organize and mobilize them at the basic level. This fact is well demonstrated in cases where the most vicious campaigns of deception cannot sway the people against the progressive mass movement as well as in cases where the counterrevolutionary state carries out a campaign of military and police suppression but fails to defeat or weaken the revolutionary mass movement of the people.
When the mass movement is well-established at the basic level, especially among the working people, then it can easily build and support the organs of leadership and organizational effectivity at various levels, up to the national level. It can mobilize significantly large and effective numbers of people at the centers of the towns, districts, provinces, regions and the capital of the country. The higher levels of leadership and organization and the lower levels can interact to drive the mass movement forward according to the general political line.
Anti-imperialist and democratic mass movements are well-rooted in many countries. These have become interconnected with their counterparts within global regions. The cohesion and coordination of the mass movements within a global region can be effected through conferences, seminars, forums, a standing regional committee and timely consultations.
The formation of global region committees and organizations does not always have to precede the formation of the international organization. An international organization can be formed by calling for the participation of people’s organizations based in various countries. The International League of Peoples’ Struggle was first established as an international organization and subsequently called on its member-organizations to form national chapters before pushing in earnest the formation of the global region committees and organizations.
At the moment, there are several international formations or combinations of people’s organizations. These can be consensus-based formal and informal alliances. They can make declarations and agreements of anti-imperialist solidarity, mutual support and cooperation. We are witness to the growing unity, cooperation and coordination of these international organizations in carrying out mass mobilizations to oppose the vile policies and acts of imperialism and reaction and call for a new and better world of greater freedom, democracy, development, social justice, healthy environment and peace.
III. Prospects
The current financial and economic crisis is far from over in the US and in the world. The bursting of the bubbles in housing, bank credit, the stock market and derivatives has not yet run its full course and continues to deflate values in trillions of dollars due to debt de-leveraging in the trillions. The bubble in derivatives has been the biggest in the entire history of capitalism and is estimated to range from 500 trillion to a quadrillion dollars on a global scale. The corporate bond bubble among the giant industrial firms is expected to burst in a big way this year. So is the bubble in US treasury bonds that has rapidly inflated due to the bank bailouts in the trillions.
The real economy is bound to be further afflicted by bankruptcies, drastic production cutbacks, decline of employment and incomes and the further loss of effective demand. The accumulation of debt financing by governments and private corporations in so many decades is cascading into and collapsing on entire economies. The Keynesian stimulus packages of the US and other governments are puny and restricted by the persistent neoliberal policy bias and the ever insistent demands of the financial and non-financial corporations to be the first served with the bailouts.
Let us recall that the pump-priming fiscal measures adopted by Roosevelt under the New Deal did not really solve the Great Depression and stabilize the US economy. These measures would counter now and then the depressed conditions only to be pushed back by “free market” arguments against deficit spending in a period of lower tax collection. It was large-scale civil and military production related to World War II that finally stimulated the US economy.
There is good reason to be wary of Obama’s kind of top economic advisers like Volcker, Rubin and Sommers and his top appointees to the US Treasury Department (Geithner),
the US Securities and Exchange Commission (Schapiro), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (Gensler) and so on. These are exponents of unregulated “free market” capitalism, especially Sommers and Geithner who were instrumental in pushing the Financial Services Modernization Act and the Modernization of Commodity Futures Act during the time of Clinton in 1999. Geithner is a dyed-in-the-wool factotum of Wall Street, like his former bosses Bernanke and Paulson. It is highly probable that the glittering Obama promises of stimulating the economy the New Deal/Keynesian way would be squashed under the pressures of unwieldy bipartisanship and the persistence of the neoliberal policy bias.
The US policy makers under the Obama administration have already indicated that they will continue to chant the slogan of “free market” capitalism, retain as much as they can a high level of deregulation favoring the financial and industrial giants and carry out a number of measures to reverse the industrial decline of the US. These measures include Keynesian pump-priming (like public works, expansion of social services and green energy projects), military production and taking back some of the manufacturing of consumer goods conceded previously to US allies.
The current financial and economic crisis is grave enough to threaten and undermine the position of the US as the No. 1 economic and military power. But the decline of the US as the unquestioned No. 1 imperialist power will not occur rapidly on a straight line. The other imperialist powers have also taken a big hit as a result of hewing to the line of “neoliberal globalization”. This is well illustrated in a current cynical joke among Washington insiders, Republican and Democratic, that the financial crisis would have been far worse for the US had it not succeeded in exporting the toxic financial products to Europe, Japan and elsewhere. The US is still in a position to adopt self-serving policies to slow down its decline and further beggar its own imperialist allies and neocolonial underlings.
However, such policies will be very harmful to other countries and the people of the world and will provoke them to react and adopt their own policies. The currents of multipolarization will thus become stronger. In fact, the struggle among the imperialist powers for a redivision of the world in terms of political hegemony and economic territory (sources of cheap of raw materials and cheap labor, markets and fields of investment) will become more intense. The adverse effects of the crisis on the so-called emerging markets and the general run of raw material-exporting countries in the third world are leading to social and political turmoil.
The severity and dire implications of the global economic crisis push the imperialist powers to intensify aggression and military intervention and accelerate their preparations for war. The trend of US-instigated aggressive wars has conspicuously risen since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and global recession that hit Japan the hardest. Since its economic slowdown at the turn of the century, the US has become even more aggressive with the so-called global war on terror as a convenient pretext, to pump-prime the military industrial complex, as well as further expand an consolidate its global hegemony.
The NATO allies of the US, notably Germany and France, have been less enthusiastic in supporting US military campaigns and programs such as in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and in the former Soviet bloc countries. Russia is wary of the US and NATO policies and track record of expansion and aggression and have formed with China and some Central Asian states the military alliances, Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
No one can accurately predict how long the global financial and economic crisis will persist and how the imperialist powers can solve or aggravate it. But there is ample ground and ample time for the working class, the mass organizations and the broad masses of the people to further strengthen themselves against the onslaughts of monopoly capitalism and all reaction and carry out mass movements to make demands for basic social reforms in all countries and to wage revolutionary struggles in an ever increasing number of countries.
At any rate, the Greater Depression is still looming ahead. There will be more widespread social and political turmoil in various countries of the world.Wars of aggression and military intervention are in the horizon. The most effective counter to this is in the ceaseless consolidation and expansion of the revolutionary mass movements for national liberation, democracy and socialism. Posted byBulatlat.com
