Trumpism as a historic turning point: 12 theses

Trump will print dollars to finance wars.
Trump will print dollars to finance wars.

The following positions have already been formulated on 28-1-2017. Until now, the development of domestic and foreign policy of the United States confirms the trend towards intensified preparations for war. Therefore, I now publish these statements as a contribution to the debate among workers and within the proletarian internationalist milieu.

Submitted by Fredo Corvo on March 1, 2017

Fredo Corvo March 1st 2017.

The end of neoliberalism
1) The neoliberal policy response of the bourgeoisie to the economic and social crisis of the 1970s, is coming to an end. What began as an uncontrolled rise of populism, with the installation of the government Trump and the approaching new open crisis has reached the stage where a political change can take place:
• from globalization to protectionism, and that
• increasing local wars show a trend of incipient formation of imperialist blocs around the existing contradictions between the axis China-Russia, and the US
• the unfocused pumping of money into the economy gives way to the focused expansion and reconstruction of the war economy.

2) The neoliberal offensive has materially increased the gap between labor and capital and at the same time divided the working class into workers with permanent contracts, workers with flexible contracts and unemployed workers.

3) Populism has been used the reactionary utopia living the West within the class that consists of nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s, to poison consciousness in parts of the class with xenophobia and nationalism. This ideological defeat now threatens to become deeper if the workers accept to be chained to the war economy *).

4) The young working class in the East is relatively inexperienced with the deceptions of bourgeois democracy, and of 'free' trade unions which will be put forward in protection of the state when the class will fight at a higher level. In both East and West, the new generations of the working class have no experience of nationalism in a situation of imperialist war.

What to do?

5) The main task of revolutionaries in the present period is to analyze current events from the view point of the working class, that is the method and the corresponding basic positions of its science, historical materialism. In addition, they deepen all theoretical-historical questions that arise in the analysis of current events, and not vice versa.

6) Where possible, the revolutionaries work together in this analysis and its dissemination in the class from which they arise. When necessary, they unite on a smaller scale on the basis of positions that have not yet been clarified by the workers' struggle.

7) Whatever may be the scale of their organization, the revolutionaries in their mutual cooperation, in anticipation of future struggles, emphasize the characteristics of the autonomous struggle of their class as a whole, namely thinking for one selves, self-motivation and open discussions on differences in analysis.

8) Subjects of analysis include:
▪ the capitalist nature of the crisis,
▪ the imperialist war as a capitalist solution to the crisis,
▪ the development of proletarian struggle against the effects of the crisis and against war in a political struggle against the bourgeois state in all its forms,
▪ unification of the working class in the struggle against all divisions by type of contract, nation or culture or religion
▪ the communist utopia of a society without capital, without state and without war.

Theoretical / historical issues

9) A historical materialist analysis of capitalism is not limited to the relationship between base and superstructure (even if included the dialectic of negation of all relations of production), but also includes the analysis of the relationship between the development of the productive forces of labor on the one hand and the relations of production or class relations on the other.

10) During its period of growth and flourishing the development of productive forces were still unrestrained by the existence of capitalist class society. The real movement of the proletariat went through struggles to improve its situation, sometimes by means of alliances with other classes within a country, and as a result development of productive forces was promoted. This did NOT mean that the working class could not proceed with its revolutionary struggle, or that it was a working class end in itself to promote the development of the productive forces.

11) In exceptional cases there were opportunities to execute the communist worldwide revolution by association of proletarian struggle: bourgeois revolutions and wars. Important moments were also the periodic economic crises, where the inherent contradictions of capitalism presented themselves on a world scale to the proletariat in the most poignant way. For this reason, Marx called the crisis a "period of social revolution."

12) The fact that the revolutionary potential in its period of growth and flourishing, and at the end thereof, have not led to the world revolution, does not detract from the richness of the revolutionary experiences of 1848, 1871 and 1905-1923, as well as the counterrevolution against the latter, including the necessarily limited historical positions of the revolutionaries at that time and the role they played in it.

*) Contrary to what is believed in line with the misjudgment by the ICC of the wave of workers' struggles in the 1960s and 1970s as (pre -) / "revolutionary", a physical defeat of the new generations of working class that have emerged since then, is not a precondition for mobilization of the proletariat for imperialist wars on a large scale.

Reproduction permitted by mentioning the source: http://libcom.org/blog/fredo-corvo

Comments