https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/07/climate/louisiana-crawfish-disaster-us-climate/index.html

Yes...that will solve the issue. Now I just need to scrape together $595,000 and I can finally have my own little slice of heaven. Thanks, Joe!

Revolution in Our Lifetime

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make the apple fall.

It is possible to win and it is possible to win in our lifetime.^[1] This is a necessary starting point for any socialist revolution, anywhere, including in North America. Only when we begin with this proposition can we map a path to the seizure of state power. Any other starting point is defeatist. We are not here to equivocate, revise, or delay. We are here to bring about a total revolution in social relations.

It is shocking, then, to see professed revolutionaries in North America repudiate this principle. For example, when arguing for the support of international struggles, advocates will deftly expose the evils of imperialism and rightly insist upon solidarity in response, but what further direction do they give to those they win over? They direct us into elections, lobbying politicians, academic debate, and symbolic protest. In effect, the people with the closest proximity to the enemy are told they must act only as cheerleaders for resistance movements catching U.S. bombs abroad. Overthrowing our ruling class isn't on the agenda, despite the benefit to international struggles that would come if we could tie down even a fraction of the U.S.'s ability to project violence across the world. The failure to consider this possibility cuts off all thought of accumulating the forces needed to make a rupture within the United States. And because accumulating forces through developing deep ties to the masses is the most stable base from which to escalate confrontation, dismissing this path also dismisses effective and sustained tactical escalations, such as coordinated direct action or sabotage.

In other words, purveyors of this political line perceive international solidarity too narrowly. They separate our struggle from the global struggle for liberation, and they maintain or widen the divide between revolutionary classes and nations, between the core and the periphery. And yet, if we take the recurring advice of the most advanced decolonial movements and their leaders, it is that we should learn to fight alongside them and push to be as combative and militant as they are; that the further we are able to push in that direction as a movement, the greater our contribution to their struggles against U.S. imperialism. In the words of Adolfo Gilly from his Introduction to Fanon's A Dying Colonialism,

"Instead of pitying us and being horrified by the atrocities of imperialism, better fight against it in your own country as we do in ours... That is the best way to help us and put an end to the atrocities."

Some dismiss this advice based on a conscious belief that revolution in the United States is not possible. For others, impossibility remains an uninterrogated assumption. But this is the tricky thing about scientific socialism and the political mode: whether or not a revolution is truly possible cannot be known in advance. It is a thesis, an axiomatic starting point. The actual possibility can only be resolved in the experiment and synthesis, in political practice. This starting point is as much required for proving the revolution as it is for proving its impossibility. It is the starting point towards either building the mass movement and party necessary to win, or, even in losing a revolution in the imperial core, having concretely supported the international struggle. 

Organizing for international solidarity is far from the only place where this tendency to side-step the question of revolution appears. This tendency is rife within all manner of issue-specific organizing and self-described activism in the U.S. In the sphere of nonprofit organizing, where promising revolutionary rhetoric sometimes appears, systematic thinking about how to realize a revolutionary seizure of power and any consideration of how their own programmatic work may or may not relate to that is completely off the agenda. Mention it aloud and you will find yourself either the subject of patronizing smiles or hushed into silence as though the very thought is forbidden. 

The overriding directive from leadership in these spaces is that any possible revolution is, at best, so far into the future that speaking about it is a distraction from the work of harm mitigation and legal reform. Push too hard on the matter and force them to address it publicly and they will misrepresent what it means to take the question of revolution seriously, dismissing the discussion as an ultra-left call to immediately move into armed struggle, as if there aren't obvious steps to be taken between a reformist starting point and the ultimate destination of a seizure of power. So, on the one hand, they will give lip service to revolution, name-dropping and quoting revolutionaries from past struggles, but, at the same time, they will energetically marginalize and silence anyone who would call on them to live up to those quotes because it disrupts their foundation funded programming and pulls the horizon of revolution too close for comfort. 

This orientation to revolution as something perpetually on the horizon is unfortunately very common, even among those forces who are explicit about their belief that a revolution is possible. Such organizations have developed programs around accumulating forces to win a revolution, when the time is right, but their methods and practices make clear that they don't really believe in achieving victory any time soon, certainly not in our lifetime. 

To the extent that there is a strategic orientation around accumulating forces, it is typically framed around two often overlapping projects: contesting elections and party building. For example, the hegemonic program within the DSA of electing minority legislative delegations and losing presidential elections presumes the only path forward is to gain a foothold within the government itself and, from there, mitigate the harms of capitalism. You can even see some adherents of this path dismissing other trends on the basis that their electoral faction is serious about governance, as if a handful of legislators who can't consistently coordinate around policy and messaging in a body with over 500 members has anything to do with governing. But they promise that at some point in the distant future, they will accumulate a majority position in government, albeit working alongside the oppressor and at the ultimate pleasure of a relatively unmolested ruling class

that's

"democracy," after all. The possibility of actually winning the world we want is so thoroughly dismissed by these social democratic tendencies that it is simply not discussed, or perhaps it's the case that the vision of the world they want is so stunted that it's not all that different from what we already have.

But what of party building as a revolutionary project? The most basic understanding of political history makes clear that to seize state power we must have a revolutionary party. The question then is whether any of the party building projects in the U.S. take the possibility of victory seriously. They do not.

Consider the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), for which party building is not only their end goal, but evidently the limit of their entire program. Methodologically, PSL's party building centers around the accumulation of members, a process built out of a constant churning of almost exclusively petit-bourgeois recruits.^[2] Similar to the DSA, it is presumed that, at some point, enough will be accumulated that the organization will be able to play power politics with the ruling class.

Important strategic considerations are completely neglected; for instance, how to develop deep and durable roots among the masses, or how to protect party networks from repression. Further confusion is created by intervening in electoral politics solely for the purpose of gaining even more members. The PSL's allergic reaction in the Palestine mobilizations to anything tactically beyond marching in circles is similarly self-defeating.

The failure to escalate the Palestine protests, indeed the active deescalation coming from PSL, is illuminating, as both a massive strategic blunder and a betrayal of this moment. PSL has significant access to the networks that have been mobilized and a robust communications infrastructure, such that it could lead hundreds or thousands of people to block a port, or a military base, or to occupy weapons manufacturers. They also have the logistical capacity, proved by their contribution to the massive November 4th protests, to maintain those blockades and occupation for days or weeks, or at least until they were forcibly dispersed by the police. If they stepped forward other organizations would contribute as well.^[3] So, why don't they? 

At this point, they can't blame the unwillingness of a movement whose members are being driven to martyrdom for lack of an avenue to end the most brutal genocide humanity has ever witnessed. The answer, it seems, is that they are not interested in confronting the ruling class, even when the people are demanding it. Rather, they are interested in riding this wave of mass protest while recruiting as many new members as possible, and then pushing them into the PSL's presidential campaign, which has as its only practical purpose the recruitment of yet more members. But then what? At what point is party building complete enough that you can use the organization to actually fight? And is the size of the party the only determinant of when it's time to fight? What if fighting back is the greatest recruitment tool you could ever hope for?

This is where the magnitude of PSL's strategic blunder can be seen. There is no surer or faster way to build a party than by winning over the millions of people currently activated by the heroic resistance in Palestine. The most obvious path in this direction would be to lead the masses where they want to go, which is into direct, forceful confrontation with the people and institutions prosecuting this genocide. Actively avoiding and deflecting the pressure for more militant action fully demonstrates that, despite their stated program, PSL is not building a party that can contest for power.

If PSL were to instead facilitate the increasing militancy of the movement, it would expose itself to strong state repression, and its leaders would face very serious personal risks. Yet, this is an organization that lionizes the experiences of communist revolutions and national liberation struggles throughout history

struggles in which

key leaders took risks that landed them in prison, exile, or worse, and they still won. Pointedly, these are the kinds of risks that the leadership of the Palestinian Resistance have been making for decades. Why not us? What greater honor than to face repression for unleashing the combativeness of the masses to stop a genocide and support the Palestinian's national liberation struggle? 

The great shame of the PSL is that there is no other formation with the avowed intention of making a revolution, the broad network of members and relationships with adjacent organizations, the media apparatus to point the masses at strategic targets, and the logistical capacity to sustain such protests. As it stands, the most confrontational our movement can get is to engage in episodic and symbolic protests, perhaps shut down a bridge, a tunnel, or a highway for a few hours. At the more militant end, the best we can do is for small groups to engage in civil disobedience or direct actions that harass the enemy. These are the limits that PSL and others are actively defending at the national and local level. Unless something gives, they will keep calling toothless "Shut It Down" protests with their partners until the movement demobilizes, but not before many thousands more Palestinians have died, and not before they've pulled thousands of people into their campaign to not elect Claudia and Karina. 

Imagine having the capacity and opportunity to unleash the masses and move with them in fighting the ruling class, even with the foreseeable result of being beaten back by the agents of state violence, and not taking it. Now, imagine refusing that opportunity at a moment when millions of people are positioned for mobilization and feeling the kind of emotional intensity that would drive a person like Aaron Bushnell to self-immolate. It's frankly outrageous. And it's not just a lost opportunity for the PSL, but for all of us. 

What we see here is that the PSL's specific methodology of accumulating membership is self-evidently not going to build a party with durable roots amongst the masses, or even a broad level of respect. They are determined to not grasp the once in a generation opportunity to gain the broad respect that would create a basis for quickly sinking roots among the masses. Deep support among the masses being the only basis for defending a party against a fascist crackdown, their inability and lack of interest in developing that support means they will not be able to weather the kind of repression we will see with a second Trump presidency. Worse, their list of members is completely transparent to the forces of state repression, as they generally have people sign up with an internet form.^[4] So, not only do they not have a basis for defending themselves, they have inadvertently created a door-knocking list for a fascist roundup. You wouldn't do this if you believed that a revolution, win or lose, was possible within the next 10-20 years. It is quite clear that, although PSL has a program that presumes winning is possible, they have no serious expectation of ever accomplishing it in our lifetime. Once again, actually winning a revolution is perpetually on the horizon.^[5]

Moving past false party building projects, if we start from the position that overthrowing the ruling class and seizing state power for a socialist project is possible in our lifetime, and we take the development of this potential seriously, some important realizations arise. Chief among these realizations is that organized force is necessary to overthrow the ruling class of the United States. If that's the case, a revolutionary movement must build the infrastructure, both ideological and material, needed to project that force and to survive the reaction. To put it in simple terms, on the ideological side we need broad exposure to our ideas and political program and we need a strong partisanship to that program among significant sections of the classes that would form a revolutionary coalition. Within that network, now bound together ideologically, we will find the material elements of the infrastructure of resistance. The preeminent material element is the movement partisan or party cadre who form the nodes in this network, tying individuals and communities together in struggle, spreading propaganda, and securing resources to protect and support the movement. The end goal is an above-ground network that distributes information and resources, with an underground (the capacity for self defense, hiding and being hidden) embedded within it. You'll know you're there when the masses are willing to harbor revolutionaries from state violence, even at great personal cost.

So, where do we begin? We have the starting point: that a revolution is possible in our lifetime. We have a bare-bones idea of what's required to accomplish that. Beyond that is a gaping chasm of unknowns. The most critical question being who are the people that are the base of a revolutionary movement in the United States? Almost unanimously, the answer would be the working class. But that obscures almost as much as it illuminates. What working class? Where? What about elements of the proletariat and semi-proletariat forced into the labor reserve? What about any remaining vestiges of peasantry, or immigrants with peasant backgrounds? What role can the petit bourgeoisie play, or even class traitors among the big bourgeoisie? And how do national and other identities running through these classes and subclasses crystallize into identifiable revolutionary subjects? When communists are faced with these questions, the most basic questions of our craft, we don't wave them away and rely on stale doctrine, dusty traditions, and hoary assumptions. We investigate.

We understand based on historical experience that winning will require organized political violence with mass support, so we understand that building that mass support is a prerequisite to victory. Our immediate question is both with whom to build that mass support and how exactly to do it. In essence, we need to identify who the revolutionary masses are, who their enemies are, and who forms the vacillating middle forces between them. This has to be a specific and concrete analysis of actual class dynamics in situ. The "method" handed down through the communist movement in the United States of simply presuming a class structure based on schematics derived from doctrine developed over 100 years ago must be abandoned. That's not to say the schematic is unsound, but it is not politically actionable. It doesn't tell you concretely with whom to organize or how.

In terms of how to undertake this investigation, what methods to use, and how to train ourselves to do it well, I can only point to examples and suggest potential models, while also sharing a sense of what we should not do. First, a thorough class analysis that creates a basis for actual political engagement with class elements of an incipient revolutionary movement is not something that can be found hiding in a library. What can be found in books are instances of similar investigations, usually partial and outside of our current context, which can suggest methods of investigation. Additionally, "book" research is a source of broader information about the social formations in North America and how they link to the periphery, which can help identify promising targets for further investigation. However, the main element of the investigation is actually talking to people face to face. In other words, this is the type of investigation which would require methods that look more like journalism or ethnography than parsing through reams of economic statistics. 

An example of this method and its output would be Mao Zedong's Report on an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan. Another example can be found in the practice of Amilcar Cabral and the PAIGC, which is described in Basil Davidson's The Liberation of Guiné: Aspect of an African Revolution. Investigations that model a more formal structure would be W.E.B. Du Bois' The Philadelphia Negro, which used systematic survey methods. The methods of Mao and Cabral are processes for developing actionable political analysis and, at the same time, they are themselves elegant political interventions. In addition to training ourselves in methods of communist political practice, the process of speaking with people directly about their class existence, their hardships, grievances, and systems of support, is one of introducing our movement to them. If done right, this introduction begins the process of winning them to the revolutionary movement, and winning them to this movement is the essence of building the infrastructure of resistance, including a revolutionary party.

Do not misunderstand: this investigation doesn't happen while setting aside current struggles for a later time. It must be done at the same time that other struggles are advancing, and it must be done from within these struggles. Critically, this is not a prescription for stepping away from the movement for Palestinian liberation. Rather, that struggle must be escalated strategically and tactically. On the strategic side, our slogans need to move from demanding a ceasefire, to demanding total liberation for the Palestinian people, and they must connect the realization of that demand with a goal of overthrowing the U.S. ruling class that is the driving force behind israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. On the tactical side, small groups engaged in civil disobedience need to escalate to direct action. Those doing direct action should consider escalating to sabotage. At the mass scale, those organizing marches of hundreds or thousands need to be pointing those mobilizations at more strategic targets, and working towards more sustained interruptions of operations at these targets. And, across the board, leadership sitting at the gateways to this movement need to stop deescalation, while explicitly endorsing escalation in both word and deed. 

In the last five months, the struggle for Palestinian liberation has radicalized millions of people in North America and has shifted the political center of gravity. This shift has contributed to a whole train of prior fractures in the global system of capitalism-imperialism presided over by the United States and its imperial bloc. Where the temporary shutdown of capitalism in response to the COVID pandemic shot cracks through the system, in the United States this was followed by the George Floyd Rebellion, further weakening the structure. At the same time, an objective increase in the conflict between capital and labor ensued, including the attempted recuperation of capital's position prior to the pandemic, most painfully through the unleashing of price inflation across the necessities of life. Internationally, the Global South has embarked on an inexorable process of asserting its sovereignty, decisively marking the zenith of U.S. hegemony. As these fractures have developed, a wave of fascist political advances has washed over the collective West. And overarching all of these stresses have been catastrophic changes to the global climate system, the very cradle of life on the planet. This was our reality on October 6, 2023, and it was in this context that the Palestinian Resistance broke through, shattering the system of global domination that is the source of ruling class power in North America. It may not look as if the system has fundamentally come apart, but that is only because the broken pieces are falling in slow motion and have yet to land. All of these conditions have decisively pulled the horizon of revolution into our lifetime. 

So, let us begin...

---

^1^ This intervention is intended to be non-antagonistic and to engage politically conscious people in thinking through these questions. To paraphrase Mao Zedong, my intention is to struggle against incorrect views for the sake of building unity and getting the work of revolution done properly. If the language is sharp or totalizing and without caveat, this is due to the need for clarity in political interventions, as compared to the obscurity of academic and scholastic interventions. An unequivocal position in favor of one end of the contradiction is necessary to point out a course correction. It is not a full dismissal of the validity of the other side of the contradiction or the complexity of our reality. 

^2^ This method of "building the party" is replicated in almost every communist/socialist party in the United States.

^3^ It should be noted that it is not only the PSL that is failing in their responsibility to help the masses identify impactful targets and facilitate actions against them. Every major organization involved in the broader movement for Palestine in the U.S. has either failed to identify strategic bottle-necks in the war machine, or has interfered against the use of appropriate protest tactics for disrupting them in a sustained way. 

^4^ It is a fact, established through Edward Snowden's leaks, that the NSA literally makes a copy of all electronic communications in the United States, with years of traffic stored in databases to be "google" searched by a whole bevy of federal law enforcement agencies. The absolute minimum in security for a communist organization in this context is to keep your membership sign ups off the internet.

^5^ It is theoretically possible for the PSL to shift away from their opportunistic program and practice, and I hope they do, but we can't wait around for it.

like I live in rural montana where most of the population is reactionary and racist and it is objectively less violently authoritarian here than nyc

https://twitter.com/akarl_smith/status/1765149619976028357

The Democrats Have Nothing Left To Offer You

Renewed student loan payments. Increased drilling and oil extraction. Removal of all COVID protections. Strike-breaking. Increased border security and intensified detention and deportation of children and families at the southern border. Failure to codify gay marriage. Failure to codify the right to abortion. Failure to codify protection for trans people. Genocide. The Democratic Party comes to you with open hands and presents you these policy planks.

War. Pollution. Famine. Death.

The Biden-Harris campaign website doesn't have a single policy on it. Go and look. It urges you to donate, and nothing more. "Why should we tell you what our policies are?" they ask, their dead eyes mocking. "You know what our policies are: we're not Trump."

The political horizons of the Democratic Party have narrowed down to a single point. Once the party of "progressive" labor and struggles for racial recognition, the Democrats have jettisoned the last of their betrayed allies and have adopted a blank and stony face. They refuse to make the case for their administration, because they are no longer capable of doing so. As their policies and inaction increasingly alienate and repulse the masses, the only people still arguing on behalf of the Democratic Party are the so-called socialist parties of the United States Empire: the Democratic Socialists of America and CPUSA.

Why is this the case? Surely, there must have been a time when the Democratic Party had something to offer someone other than their ruling-class donors?

There was.

To understand what's become of the Democrats, and why they have increasingly tacked toward war abroad and law and order at home, you have to understand the history of the 20th century from the point of view of the ruling class. Of course, we're told one story

the one

that we all learn in high school history

but the truth is quite

something else.

The story we learn is one about Roosevelt and the New Deal, the incredible progressive dream of equality and freedom for all. We're told that basically only racists opposed the New Deal programs, that FDR brought about an era of prosperity never-before-seen by the United States, and that he "saved" the country from the Great Depression. This isn't just the story told by the Democrats, it's also the one told by the so-called Communists of the U.S. The problem is, none of it is true.

The New Deal With the Devil

To understand the limits of the Democratic Party, we need to begin with the historical composition of the so-called Democratic coalition and how the party realigned at the beginning of the 1930s. Labor unrest had rocked the young settler-republic: in 1877, workers established the brief but influential St. Louis Commune during the 1877 General Strike; nine years later,  in 1886, the Haymarket Affair shook the country. In 1894, the Pullman Strike affected the railroads country-wide. The Coal Wars saw brutal repression of strikers by government troops and Pinkerton agents. In 1919, what came to be called the Red Summer reached  near revolutionary fervor in the major cities, spurred primarily by class consciousness in the Black Belt and returning Black soldiers amidst the shadow of World War I. Acts of white supremacist terror and lynchings, meant to maintain the status quo, were confronted with fierce resistance from Black communities. Hundreds died. Nascent Black liberation movements, such as the African Blood Brotherhood were born from the ashes. This was followed by the 1921 Tulsa Massacre in Greenwood as white supremacist capitalism asserted itself over the wealthiest Black neighborhood in America by razing it and killing between 75 and 300 people.

In the face of this labor agitation came the Great Depression. The threat of the final and total overthrow of the capitalist order loomed large as the world capitalist economy melted down and threw twelve million people out of work. The capitalists scrambled to craft a policy reply to the crisis. It finally came in the form of European style social democracy. Thus was born the New Deal. In the words of conservative think-tank the Hoover Institute, the revolution never came because the "man in the White House co-opted the left."

But the New Deal didn't end the Great Depression. For white workers (and European workers aspiring to whiteness), it mitigated the worst harms of the economic collapse that we call the Great Depression, but it was only the outbreak of World War II that stopped the bleeding. Communists in the CPUSA went from accurately assessing FDR as a kind of fascist at the beginning of the '30s to openly embracing him by the end of the decade. In the process, they abandoned the revolutionary struggle and contented themselves with economic gains for the working class. The New Deal became the basis of an unsteady alliance between the officers of organized labor

the AFL and other unions, primarily

and the old

Democratic party machine.

Government control of the centralized war production industry supercharged the U.S. economy and helped propel the settler-republic into the position of world hegemon. The U.S. stayed out of World War II as long as it could, letting the older empires slug out the fight, hoping that the USSR would be debilitated by their conflict with fascism. As a result, the ruined capitalist world was dominated in the post-war period by the U.S. Control over the complicated machinery of empire meant the U.S. imperial managers could funnel profits back into the domestic U.S. market

and keep funding the social democratic

project FDR had promised.

"The traditional colonialist powers represented by Britain, France, Holland and Belgium labored heavily under the War burdens, while Germany, Italy and Japan labored heavily under the burdens of defeat, a situation that enabled U.S. capital to extend and penetrate into all these countries through the reconstruction process," wrote the Marxist-Leninist People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine in its 1968 analysis of the world-imperialist bloc.

Breakdown

President Carter repudiated the deal between the Democrats and organized labor as the U.S. economy stalled and stagnated in the 1970s. This tack to the right was fully realized by Bill Clinton and the "Third Way" Democrats of the 1990s. The Clintonite period is where we get the term neoliberalism. Like neoconservativism, neoliberalism was a rejection of the traditional left-wing policies the Democrats embraced between 1932 and 1970.

It's easy to call policies neoliberal, but what does it mean? In content, neoliberalism is the shifting of state-sponsored programs into private hands so they can make a profit. The U.S. Empire never developed a strong welfare state like Europe

despite Lyndon Johnson's attempts

to do so, the security state and the military industrial complex demanded too much money and attention. Instead, it was always somewhat neoliberal, relying on private corporations to recognize their interests in forestalling revolutionary consciousness. These corporations invested in pensions, healthcare, programs, etc. for their employees... until Carter signaled the Democrats' willingness to turn on their one-time partners, the officers and bureaucrats of the labor unions.

Between Carter and Clinton, the Republican Party became the main vehicle for ruling-class action. Having repudiated the old progressive deal, the Democrats no longer had anything to offer the ruling class in terms of mass mobilization. Carter and Clinton, the bookends to Democratic control, were both indistinguishable from Republicans in their economic policy; Clinton, in fact, ran to the right of former CIA director H.W. Bush in 1992 on almost every economic issue.

The Obama Administration, despite its pretensions to restoring the voided social contract of the 1950s and 1960s, increased the party's commitment to neoliberalism and the degradation of unions. A financial catastrophe comparable to the stock market crash of 1929 put the Obama White House in a position quite similar to that of the FDR White House. However, since 1929, there had been major developments in the state's repressive machinery. No one was afraid of labor unrest or a looming revolution; the Occupy movement was easily disarmed and countered. What was the answer of the 21st century Democratic Party to the New Deal? FDR provided relief to the working class. Obama provided relief to the owning class.

To prevent total economic meltdown, the federal government infused the economy with new money; it "bailed out" banks. Not one of the criminal bankers responsible for the crisis was ever held accountable. The banking system itself was put on life support as federal regulators eased restrictions on lending that have remained in this "foot on the gas" position until this very day. Interest rates were cut, reserve requirements were overturned, and the U.S. (and thus the global) economy was puffed up on "aid" while still remaining fundamentally unsound.

Bidenomics and the Working Class

The economy is unsound because the rate of profit is in decline. Despite its sharp recovery after the life-support system installed by the Obama regime, it once again began to tumble and continues to fall to this day. This is the law of capitalism: the concentration of capital leads to declining rates of profit worldwide.

In the chart above, we can see the sharp spike in the rate of profit when the U.S. destruction of the Soviet Union brought markets back into the capitalist world, but even with this shot in the arm, the rate of profit continues to fall over time.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the rate of profit was appreciably higher than it is today.  The rate of profit began to decline in the middle 1960s. It was at this time that the social-democratic program of the Democrats gave way to Carter in the early 1970s, and the breakup of union power with the failed Chrysler strike and culminating in the PATCO strike of the air traffic controllers. PATCO

the Professional Air

Traffic Controllers Organization

was a trade union operating from

1968 until it was decertified in 1981. Just like the railroad workers that Biden forced back to work, PATCO demanded a shorter work-week to increase safety. Carter instructed the Federal Aviation Agency not to give in to the demand to provoke a strike he knew was in the offing. Reagan took up Carter's torch and, even though he had supported PATCO vocally during his election campaign, he followed the ruling-class line shared by Democrats and Republicans: the PATCO strike was declared illegal and the union was decertified.

The fact is that, as of Biden's assumption of power, the progressive potential of the Democratic Party has been completely exhausted. The chair of the party is Jaime Harrison, a "former" lobbyist for the Podesta Group where he represented Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Berkshire Hathaway, numerous pharmaceutical corporations, and Walmart. The main funding arm of the Democratic Party is run by the board member of a CIA cut-out, the National Democratic Institute, which often works with the infamous National Endowment for Democracy to instigate regime change in socialist or nationalist countries in order to make them palatable to American business interests.

This leads us to the Bidenomics of today: massive debt relief and loan programs for private businesses while the working class see only the steep climb of inflation. Prices have climbed 20% since the 2020 implementation of Biden's relief plan for the rich. Wages have risen, but only roughly 10% in that time. That means every dollar in 2024 can buy what 80 cents could buy in 2020

a devaluation that is now almost

the equivalent of having robbed every working person in the United States of a quarter of their income. Getting paid an additional 10 cents on the dollar doesn't make that much better.

There is no appetite among the Democratic Party's ruling class supporters to budgeon any economic issue. We have seen Biden break rail strikes even when the rail workers repeatedly warned that the health and safety of the entire country was on the line. His administration is only interested in offering relief to one class: the ruling class. Since 2020, the concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires has increased 70%. This is under Biden's watch.

What about social issues? These, too, have been surrendered by the Democrats. The Biden regime has failed to codify abortion at the federal level, failed to protect trans rights, which are under assault in the right-reactionary stronghold states of the South, failed to even try to hold the police accountable for violence doled out on oppressed communities (he's worked hard to increase police funding and presence in the wake of George Floyd's death), failed to stop the creeping entrenchment of crisis-fascism amongst the Republicans, and failed to step down from an aggressive, hawkish foreign policy that sees all countries and all realms of the earth as the prerogative of the U.S. Empire's intervention.

There Is Nothing Left

The last of the progressive elements in the Democratic Party were sacrificed to the profit drive long ago. Social democrats are merely chum in the water for fascist retrenchment. Today, they serve as seductive sheepdogs, struggling to lead the working people away from the realization that the entire system is corrupt.

The bargain is a raw one!

For too long, we have been induced to trade our economic freedom in exchange for economic security. Now, even the lure of security has been taken away. All that remains is the threatened cudgel of Trump. For this, it is clear, the Democrats love him. Oh, not the rank and file, not the Democratic voter, for whom Trump is the expression of every foul and carnal urge, but for the Democratic politician there could be no more effective whip to mobilize those disaffected portions of their former electorate.

"We have nothing to offer you. Don't look for us to offer you anything other than this: we aren't Trump."

That's not enough, Mr. Biden. We must not stand by and allow the Democrats to bully us into another unholy bargain. We must stand up against them.

Our politics is about the size of our treats.