George Floyd’s murder in May was the spark that set the United States on fire. From there, the response on the part of the exploited through revolutionary days has not stopped developing. The attack on capitalist property, clashes with the police and the burning of police stations were accompanied by great mass actions in most cities in that country.
The unprecedented conditions and sufferings of workers and their most exploited sectors, such as the black movement, immigrants and a radicalized rebel youth, pushed millions into combat. It is because the working class and the poor people have lost everything: work, housing, health and life.
The bankrupt pirates of Wall Street did not hesitate to throw their entire crisis on the exploited. The Covid-19 pandemic did nothing else that exposing a true massacre by capitalists causing the mass death of black and immigrant workers and massive contagions in factories.
The old mediations that contained the mass struggles and allowed for the worst attacks on them by the infamous US imperialists’ pirate regime, have failed to deflect or stop this revolutionary tide that has begun.
Previously, the Democratic Party, which believed to have controlled the situation of the exploited due to the death from the coronavirus and the economic crash -which led 43 million workers to lose their jobs-, postulated to channel the discontent of the masses in the elections next November. Thus, last March, the return to the Democratic Party of the “socialist” Sanders -a real fraud against socialism- accelerated, so that he could give his open support to Biden. Of course, the entire reformist left hanging from his coattails accompanied him.
But when nobody was expecting it, and the ruling classes felt safe waging the stick of the crack, crisis and death in their hand, and were preparing a new electoral trap, US exploited entered the combat. True independent mass actions were unfolding after a fascist policeman’s knee choked the throat of a black worker on May 25.
The revolutionary days deepened throughout the month of June. More and more sectors entered the battle. The mass political struggle, which already concentrates all the immediate demands of the exploited, hit the imperialist regime and its state.
“Autonomous zones” like in Seattle and the “Black House” in Washington were set up, taken by the struggling masses and their action committees, which gave new content to all the pre-existing organizations like the movement Black Lives Matter, the Antifa movement or the movements against white supremacists.
The masses took in their hands the struggle and the resolution of their problems. They clearly defined the enemy and in dozens of cities they set up “Commune-type” self-organizing organizations that group all the sectors that are fighting.
The clash with the police and the burning of police stations attack the heart of the bourgeois state and leave the way open and the latent motion for arming the proletariat and disarming the bourgeoisie. The demand for the disarmament of the oppressors and the armament of the oppressed.
Trump threatened to send the army while he was hidden 14 meters underground in the White House bunker. The great imperialist bourgeoisie trembled at this idea. They know what happened with the revolutionary uprising of the workers and the American people when they sent their murderous troops to massacre in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq... The threat of Trump, for now, was pushed aside into the background, it was kept latent and again the bourgeoisie tries to contain the masses by means of an electoral pacifist wave. But they are not succeeding either.
Those at the top can no longer rule as they used to and those from below do not leave them alone and with political actions in the streets the masses are carrying out a bold offensive against the executioners of the people. This could be clearly seen in the massive mobilizations that took place in different cities on June 19, the day that marks the end of slavery in the United States. The exploited gained the streets and demolished various statues of the former slavers. Also on July 4, the day of US independence, important demonstrations were held. In some of them, US flag was burned against the government and the butchers of the US imperialist bourgeoisie. And in addition there were massive mobilizations in several places in the country in support of the Palestinian masses against the Zionist state of Israel and its annexation of further territory in the West Bank.
These mass revolutionary days then opened a political crisis in the heights, since they hit from the left at all the institutions that support this murderous and infamous regime of the US imperialist pirates and Wall Street; including the facilities of its lackeys of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and its docile unions (all of them to the service of Morgan-Chase and Citibank) that do not represent even 0.001% of the American workers.
Likewise, the new round of world crack has disorganized the world division of labor and has weakened the political, economic and military control of US imperialism on the planet. The United States must quickly come out to regain control with new offensive counterrevolutionary actions, just as the masses have lashed out at its regime and state.
Under these conditions, new and broad sectors of the working class and the exploited having something to demand and conquer are entering the struggle. The objective of the combat is none other than hitting and defeating the regime and the government to get their demands. Disarming the murderous police is the first step in moving forward on the path of conquering justice, without which, as the streets of America shout, there will be no peace. It is also the way to get bread and get back work, housing, etc. Thus, the mass political struggle concentrates and subsumes the entire economic struggle.
The trend towards city-by-city self-organization had one of its greatest milestones, not only in the “Black House” in Washington, but also, as we already said, in the takeover of the Seattle central police station, transformed by the protesters into an “Autonomous zone”. Popular assemblies, black people organizing committees, student organizations are what the exploited set up to carry out these struggles. They know each other and recognize each other on the streets and self-organize in city assemblies and get coordinated within the states.
Before this, the Mayor of Minneapolis, where George Floyd had been assassinated, dared to enter an assembly in that city. The protesters and their representatives rebuked him by shouting: “Are you for the dissolution of the police, yes or no?” He replied: “I am for its reform.” And then they kicked him out. This is the feeling that runs throughout the United States, it is the program of the masses to confront the bourgeois state and its police and the combat engine of all the exploited.
Along with this, on June 19, 29 ports on the West Coast went on strike and around 60,000 dockers took the streets. The Oakland Dockers Union, the ILWU, Local 10, which in 2008-2010 had set up moving the “Million March Against War” in Iraq, was part of that great demonstration of dock workers, the advance of the working class.
Meanwhile, capitalists and transnational companies, in the midst of the pandemic, kept forcing their workers to go on working in thousands of factories, just as had happened in northern Italy. Workers must risk their lives and die like flies just to satisfy the profits of the capitalists... Tens of thousands of workers of the automakers in Detroit, like those of Chrysler and Fiat, today are in revolt not to go to produce in these conditions, where what is at stake is their lives.
The mass offensive is already here. An uprising of the exploited is under development and deepening in the United States. Large sections of the ruined middle classes openly support or sympathize with this movement.
In the hands of the bourgeoisie, the only thing the working class has ahead is crisis and catastrophe. This pushes them into combat and is deepening their radicalization. The factory and company committees that emerge in Amazon, Chrysler, Fiat or General Motors, based on worker assemblies, are imposing their the mark upon this rise of the powerful American proletariat.
Thus the iron fist of the world proletariat and oppressed peoples is tightened and strengthened through the US working class that today is striking hard against the Wall Street pirates and their infamous regime.
Crisis of the mediations and the old leaderships that contain and betray the struggle of the workers and the black people
All the control institutions and mechanisms of the bourgeois state are in crisis. This increases radicalization and mass offensive. Trade unions and reformist organizations that act as a true conservative force on the backs of workers in Europe and in other capitalist countries, here in the US are weakened to the extreme. As we have already seen, the AFL-CIO does not represent anyone among the American working class. The Democratic Party itself and its “left wings”, its NGOs and its Labor Councils are trying by all means to re-take their control of the movement of the black people and the working class... But they already mean the past.
We insist, the masses have entered into combat and have launched new organizations of struggle, such as assemblies, fronts of struggle, action committees coordinated by city and embryos of self-defense committees. Or, they have given it new content and have turned them into massive movements as with Black Lives Matter, as we have already said.
That is why this time those in power must improvise organizations to contain the revolting masses. And it is not said that they will succeed. The conditions for a revolutionary regrouping of the working ranks are already here and they will define the course of events in the next period.
The Communist Party and the Castroist and Bolivarian left, which used to have an enormous weight in the black movement in Harlem and in the Bay of San Francisco, can no longer control this tide of revolutionary actions, much less impose their policy of collaboration with the Democratic Party, beyond trying to revive their old black leaders from the ‘70s like Angela Davis. Nor can them enthuse the black people with Chavismo, Maduro and the bankrupt Bolivarians, who have long ago sold out the Latin American revolution. Castroism has just sold out Cuba to imperialism. In the past, they hugged Obama, agreed with him and praised him as the “savior of the American people”, when he was one of the governments that most conquests tore out from the workers and black people in the US after the crash of 2008.
Accompanying as a shadow to the body the crisis of Stalinism among the black people and in the American labor movement, the old SWP (Socialist Workers Party), who had long ago passed to the side of Castroism in Havana, has been totally paralyzed and in crisis. Its calls to discipline by clubbing the “disobedient” who burn the police stations and clash against the police have been only an empty, hollow and impotent call launched by a totally decomposed party that decades ago broke all continuity with the combat of the Trotskyists in the USA in the 1930s.
The social-imperialist left, like the ISO, the partners of the “socialists” of the Queen of England, and the entire “New Left” kept stuck into the coattails of Sanders that brought them to the feet of Biden, the baron of largest gas stations companies in the world. Thus, the Pedro Fuentes of the PSOL of Brazil, the Bodart of the MST of Argentina, the Bobby Saenz of the New MAS and all the Anticapitalists, have finished hanging from the skirts of Nancy Pelosi in the American Congress.
None of them came out calling to burn a police station, to fight to dissolve the police, or to send Trump to hide in a bunker underground. They are the continuity of Yalta Stalinism and the second post-war period. The ISO even dissolved into Sanders’ “democratic socialist” movement, as all these currents did, either de facto or de jure.
All these currents, together with Stalinism, have been promoting for decades a front with the imperialist gangs that they call the “democratic” ones. Yesterday the PTS of Argentina went so far as to say, with total blatancy, that the US is “expanding democracy” in the semicolonial world it oppresses. Were they just finished affirming this and the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
Years ago, the policy of the former Trotskyists, now openly allied with the Stalinists, in the US was none other than “everybody against Bush”. Now their call comes down to fighting “all of us against Trump”. In Europe, they seek to “democratize” Maastricht. They call for a fight for “real democracy”, while the masses in the US fight Trump and all Democratic governors and mayors who apply the same policy of hunger, misery and death as the Republican Party.
All of them are a neo-Stalinist left that picks up on the worst traditions of the counter-revolutionary forces of Stalinism that strangled hundreds of revolutions in the second post-war period to sustain “democratic” imperialism, which was given a truce and “peaceful coexistence” on an international level and thus saved its domination of the planet.
In the 1930s, Trotsky claimed that Rooseveltism was the expression in the US of the popular-front policy with which Stalin sustained the class-collaborationist government in France and also the Republican Front that had strangled the Spanish revolution. This notorious class-collaborationist policy is embodied today by Sanders and the reformist left in the US, led by the Communist Party and renegades of Trotskyism. This policy is meant to disorganize, divert and submit to the bourgeoisie any revolutionary mass action. But this time they have not succeeded in imposing their stamp, since it was those at the bottom who entered the fight in spite of them. In their ascent, the exploited destroyed the policy and strategy of reformism and the “New Left” before the latter could finally accommodate to the leadership of Sanders, Varoufakis, Chomsky and other social-imperialist filth that brought them to the feet of Biden and Pelosi. We are talking about real political impostors who cover the left pocket of the 1% of parasites who are leading civilization to barbarism.
The revolutionary days have thus opened up a pre-revolutionary situation in the US that leaves in crisis the regime of domination, its mechanisms of deception and all the leaderships that have covered and protected it.
The US and the world economy crash, the capitalists with their thirst for profit sending the workers to die of Covid-19 to the prison-factories, the endemic unemployment, centuries and decades of oppression of Black people, today are turning against the bourgeoisie. The American masses, one of the most powerful detachments of the world working class, are already stood up.
The American workers struck before the bourgeoisie could throw its entire crisis at them.
As we have already said, the regime’s policy is no other than, for the time being, to try strengthening the electoral trap again and reopening a wave of pacifism and illusion among the masses that by voting for the Democratic Party they can defeat Trump, a question they cannot yet impose.
Trump has taken a “right turn” to polarize and recreate a two-party system with the Democratic Party, but all he does is weaken himself without succeeding in reviving the Democrats, whose governors and mayors turned out to be murderous police chiefs, as much as the executioners of Black people and working people as the ones in the Republican Party.
Trump’s rickety act, and the fact that the Democratic Party cannot control or fool the masses for now, is clear proof that the pre-revolutionary situation is open while the exploited continue taking the streets with enormous energy in their fighting.
It is time to deepen the strategic offensive of the American working class that has begun
The masses are on the offensive. Transforming it into a strategic offensive means lead the struggle to overthrow the government and regime and directly attack the businesses, the frauds and the policies of the transnationals and imperialist bankers.
It is a matter of coordinating and centralizing by city, state and national level all the organizations that the masses have begun to set up in their struggle.
The decisive task of the moment is to advance in dissolving the police and forming a powerful militia of Black people and the working class.
Rejecting and expelling the bourgeoisie and the Democratic Party from the mass organizations, as was done in Minneapolis, is the road that the exploited must take in order not to fall into any of the traps of the bourgeois regime.
We insist, all the mechanisms of deception of the bourgeoisie have been left in crisis. This time, Black people are not alone. The old miserable AFL-CIO bureaucracy that subdued Black workers and sold them out, like the immigrants, as cannon fodder for capitalist exploitation is bankrupt. “Black lives matter” is already the demand of the whole working class that have surrounded the martyred Black people in the US with their struggle and from there have entered the fight for their demands.
“Black lives matter” also concentrates the demand to recover housing and lost conquests, to obtain dignified health for all, to stop dying in the prison-factories, to conquer 15 dollars an hour minimum-wages and to end with the detention and expulsion of those without papers who do the worst jobs together with black workers in the US.
Black people, as the most punished section of the working class and the people of the US, have become the vanguard of the struggle. Around their demand, the ranks of all the exploited are regrouping. This is the opposite of what that white AFL-CIO bureaucracy did. Their only demand during the 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century was to affiliate the non-unionized to unions that did not take into account the interests of the working class, while mass layoffs took place that these lackeys of the bourgeoisie let pass, sealing a deal with the capitalists.
Because of its long history of capitulations and betrayals, the American reformist left in all its variants, yesterday an appendix of the traitors of the AFL-CIO and today of Sanders, has remained historically at odds with the masses. Today they do not know how to relocate in the face of this rise that has begun.
They have all lost their authority in the face of the exploited and they are unable to contain them, while from their brainy analyses they criticize the “spontaneity” of the mass struggle, when it has gone as far as they never-ever dreamed it could go.
The bourgeoisie is obliged to stop this movement and this mass offensive. It will undoubtedly create new mediations to divide the unity that the exploited have gained in the struggle around Black people.
To maintain this iron unity, the first task of the US working class is to put all its strength into ending the double slavery, marginalization and repressive attacks that Black people have suffered for centuries in the US and internationally. The demands of Black people are those of the entire US working class entering the struggle. Without their victory, immigrants will not triumph, conquests will not be recovered, and health will not be achieved for all.
It is in the “Commune-type” organizations, with the self-organized masses voting for their leaders and resolutions in the assemblies, that this unity can be maintained. Strikes, stoppages and struggles for workers’ demands and against death from coronavirus have also put Black workers in the vanguard of the struggle in the factories.
None of the demands have yet been met. The way forward is to finish dissolving, defeating and disarming the police, the national guard, the fascists and all the gangs armed by capital. This will create the best conditions, as it is doing, to launch a counteroffensive in the whole American labor movement to recover all the lost conquests and stop dying for Covid-19 in the factories, as the uprising workers in Amazon, in Detroit and in hundreds factories are demanding.
The police must be disarmed! The Black people and the workers’ militia must stand firm. The transnationals must be attacked in order to live... Recover from the bankers the homes they stole from the people. We must all go to work by reducing the working day with fair wages. We must take over the private clinics in all the cities and towns and transform them into a public good.
Wall Street must be surrounded and besieged. We must conquer a single state bank, under the control of the workers, expropriating without compensation the financial oligarchy, and that single state bank, as its first measure will return all the houses that were confiscated from the American people. It also will immediatelyannul all the policies of plundering and larceny of the imperialist pirates in the colonial and semicolonial world and support with strong hands the break of the oppressed peoples with the IMF and other international usurers.
A national body of struggle must be set up to coordinate the organization bodies that are emerging in all the cities, the trade unions and establishments that are fighting for their demands with factory assemblies and committees, the anti-fascist movements, etc.
A great National Guard of Black people, workers, and rebel youth must be raised.
The bourgeoisie will try to set up new traps and manoeuvres. It will seek to divide the Black movement through the deception and fraud of the Democratic Party and NGOs in order to co-opt and manipulate it again.
The hatred of Black people is pushing the masses into an open clash with the police and repressive forces. The organization of Black people and workers’ militia is an immediate task, as is its coordination by state and nationwide. It is in the mass bodies for struggle that the self-defense committees and the arming of the masses must be centralized.
In sections of the Black movement in the US, a sense of Black people’s self-determination is beginning to emerge, the product of decades of humiliation, oppression and repression. If this or sectors of it claim territory in the US to live in peace and freedom and if they demand the right to the self-determination, this right must be defended by all workers and the masses in struggle. Centuries of enduring slavery, injustice, massacres, racism and oppression give workers and Black people that right to choose.
This bold revolutionary program is the only one that can guarantee the unity of Black people with the whole of the American working class, especially with immigrants, whose most immediate demands are “equal pay for equal work” and “documents for all”.
It is time to prepare a great struggle. Let’s open the road to defeat that finance super-oligarchy located in the 8 blocks of Wall Street.
Stop the war machine of US imperialism that massacres and controls the colonial and semi-colonial world it plunders with its military bases must be stopped. The release of the Guantanamo prisoners, the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and the destruction of all its military bases on the planet is the guarantee for the US proletariat to win the support of all the world workers and oppressed peoples. The struggle for the destruction of the Zionist state of Israel and the expulsion of the US imperialist troops and other invading troops that massacred in Syria together with the fascist Al Assad, are part of the immediate tasks of the American workers.
These are decisive and urgent tasks since sooner or later these murderous troops will attack the masses fighting today in all the cities of USA daring call to set up the veterans’ anti-war movement and together with them, the committees of rank and file soldiers who break with their officer cannot be postponed any longer.
Organizing the power of those from below at the national level around the “Black House” in Washington would put at the order of the day the defeat on the streets of the Trump government and the infamous regime of Democrats and Republicans, those representatives of Wall Street and the transnationals. This is about preparing and organizing a strategic revolutionary offensive by the US working class.
Only a government of the workers and poor people, supported by the organizations of the armed revolutionary masses, will be able to bring out of their prostration the millions of exploited people suffocated by the imperialist beast.
As we have already said, a firm call launched by the workers and Black people of the US on the workers and oppressed of the world would rebel workers in the tormented Africa in a common struggle and their fight would reach –at the hand of black workers- the heart of the Imperialist Europe of Maastricht. This would be a true electric shock. Millions of workers and pariahs on the planet today see the struggle on the streets of the United States as their own.
An appeal by the US workers’ fighting organizations to the Chinese workers would be a deadly blow to the imperialist Wall Street gangs and the fascist regime of the counter-revolutionary Chinese mandarins.
Such an appeal would achieve the unity of both working classes suffering the same torment, attacks and outrages.
The world working class must now stop the imperialist offensive and the tragedy for civilization posed by the survival of the rotten world capitalist system.
It is high time. Let the crisis be paid for by those on top.
Let’s expropriate the 1% imperialist parasites!
Let the socialist revolution return without the sellout traitors, or the Stalinist scoundrel who sold out Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba to the US and imperialism!
Under the banners of the Fourth International!
The irruption of the American proletariat as the vanguard of the world working class puts on the agenda the struggle for the refoundation of the Fourth International of 1938. Its program for socialist revolution has passed the test of history and acquires an enormous actuality in the struggles of the US working class.
The struggle for a socialist US as an immediate task is only inscribed in the program of the Fourth International. The struggle to recover its flags from the hands of those who sold it out and dirtied it, making a pact with Stalinism and the class enemy, is the way to provide the American working class with the program it deserves to achieve victory.
Carlos Munzer for the Editorial Board of the International Workers Organizer
June 19th: demonstrations in Oakland
July 4th: US flag burning in New York
Black House in Washington DC
Strike of dock workers in the western coast
Police headquarters of Seattle occupied
Free zone of Seattle
Workers of Chrysler (Detroit) stopped production due to positive cases of COVID-19
Workers of Chrysler (Detroit) stopped production due to positive cases of COVID-19