 Last week, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown told the NYT that US/NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine is 'inevitable'. This is despite the fact that Biden has said doing so is ruled out because it would lead to WWIII, which would almost definitively lead to nuclear war and the deaths of millions. The ruling capitalist class is willing to put the world on the precipice of nuclear devastation before admitting that their status as global hegemon is dwindling and that multipolarity is on the rise. It is willing to loot $95 billion from American taxpayers under the auspices of furthering the war against Russia and China and the genocide against the Palestinians – when in reality most of that money goes back into the pockets of the military industrial complex who our politicians serve. The world is changing, and those which benefited from the old order are digging their claws onto humanity trying to prevent it from advancing into a higher, more free, equitable, and democratic, mode of life. The lives of the American people continue to deteriorate as generations of youth are the first in the country's history to have a worst living standard and prospect of life than their parents. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are drowning in debts accumulated for attempting to do something so ludicrous as survive or access basic education. Today, we are not only wage slaves to the owners of big capital… but indebted to them for our own enslavement. The country is collapsing. The infrastructure, like popular trust in the media and politicians, is dwindling. We are in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy and empire like we have never experienced before. José Martí used to say that a lie can last a hundred years, but the truth catches up to it in a second. Well, those seconds have arrived for millions of Americans, for whom the truth has caught up to the lies they’ve been generationally fed. The power of the lies transmitted by the elite and their media has faded. It has wasted itself in repetition and given way to its opposite: the truth, the mortal enemy of our state’s hegemony. Americans: things DO NOT have to be this way. They are not divinely ordained to be this way. This is a product of a social system – capitalism – that has developed historically and is currently collapsing before our very eyes. The frail status of our octogenarian leaders encapsulates perfectly the status of the system. American workers, the American people, DO NOT have sovereignty. We are an occupied people. Our state and the politicians that uphold it are beholden to only one interest – those of the capitalist elite. Big corporations, banks, and investment firms are in command. Our rulers are servants of the accumulation of their capital. It is a dictatorship of capital that we live under. And it is high time that the yoke of big capital which oppresses us is thrown off. The supposed representatives of the people are in reality the representatives of the oppressors and exploiters of the people. They represent those who send our brothers and sisters abroad to lose limbs, scar their souls, and sometimes return in caskets, all to murder people whom they had more in common with than the filthy parasites who sent them there, and who profited from their misfortune. In 1776 we had a revolution because we recognized that our interests and those of the British empires could not co-exist under the same entity. This contradiction burst into a revolution - the first of many more anti-colonial revolutions in the hemisphere. Then in 1865, through the general strike of the Black proletariat, we overthrew the Southern planter class and its cotton kingdom, whose very existence undermined the democratic ideals of 1776 and placed the nation in a contradictory predicament. With the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, the advancements of our second revolution (1865) are rolled back, and a state of fascism and apartheid is installed in the U.S. South, with state sanctioned lynching being the order of the day. But this counterrevolution did not break the democratic spirit of American workers, and specifically the superexploited and oppressed black proletariat. For decades the civil rights revolution fought to overthrow the apartheid system imposed in the aftermath of 1876. Finally in 1964, with the guidance of the brilliant and revolutionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., legally sanctioned apartheid would be done away with. A new moment in the struggle would present itself, as the de jure lines which segregated our people and working class were lifted. Now our people are more integrated than ever. They are ready to fight – together – as a united working class. Dissent amongst their ranks is taking many forms, but they all are in motion against the system that keeps them poor, indebted, and desperate. The task of communists today is to give this spontaneous and varied dissent some coherence and direction. This is not imposed on workers from outside. It is much more immanent. It simply clarifies that which they already know implicitly. It makes explicit what is implicit in their consciousness. This is why, whenever we talk about the Marxist worldview with our coworkers and community members, a frequent response is "wow, this simply puts words onto what I have been feeling for a long time." The Marxist worldview is a yeast that allows the spontaneous consciousness that is already present in a dissenting working class to rise to the level of socialist class consciousness – to the understanding that they, working people, can change the world, and, that the movement of history tends towards that direction! It is only this popular unity of working people, led by an American Communist Party, a genuine peoples party, that can Free America, and through this, Free Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, and all other victims of U.S. imperialism! Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives May 2024
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