----- Original Message ----- From: Mark Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: crl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 8:40 AM Subject: [CrashList] FW: Goldner's inauguration leaflet -----Original Message----- From: Tahir Wood [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 24 January 2001 08:26 Subject: Goldner's inauguration leaflet Hi all I'm sending on this leaflet on the Bush inauguration that was sent to me = by Loren Goldner to friends and antagonists. Enjoy. Tahir This is a leaflet prepared from the Bush inauguration on Jan. 20 by myself and my collaborator Amiri (the co-founder of the Chronicles from the Class War Web Site). Snow and logistics prevented us from attending but it won't stop a modest internet distribution. Best, Loren THE PROBLEM IS CAPITALISM THE ANSWER IS COMMUNISM Some of us have been waiting almost thirty years for a situation like this. Some of us were not even born thirty years ago. In 1973-75, world capitalism entered a crisis from which it has never emerged. The U.S. in particular, while still the "engine" of the system, resembles nothing so much as an aging race horse pumped up with steroids, again and again and again. The total U.S. foreign debt, estimated at between net $2 and $4 trillion ($8.3 trillion are held abroad, set against U.S. capitalism's foreign assets), is now at 20% of GDP, the level of a typical semi-bankrupt "Third World" country. Not accidentally, American society increasingly resembles a typical semi-bankrupt "Third World" country: ever-widening gaps in wealth, a "churned" work force in which one-third of all jobs are held by temps, casuals and part-timers, (a system first tried out in Brazil in the late 1960's), 1% of the population is in the prison system, prisons and security companies the fastest-growing employers, steadily falling real wages, (10-20% since the early 70's) the longest average work-week in the "advanced" capitalist world (advanced above all in decay), a disappearing social safety net, scandalous health care, a moribund political system, and unbelievable levels of indebtedness sustained only by foreigners' fear of pulling the credit plug, and watching the biggest debt-besotted consumer market in the world contract. High-tech stocks have collapsed by 50%, the much-touted "New Economy" and "e-commerce" are laying off thousands (with many more to come), oil prices are rising, "privatization" is showing its real meaning in the California energy meltdown, the balance-of-payments deficit is a new record, and the dollar is falling, just before the "recession" becomes official. A moribund political system?=20 We've just been through an election in which one-half of the population (once again) did not vote, ending in the Florida fiasco, in which the Republicans dropped their "compassionate conservatism" for the usual hardball and scramble for booty, the Democrats preferred to lose rather than go near the issue of the obvious defrauding of tens of thousands of blacks who voted for them, and the Supreme Court showed that bourgeois "laws" are exactly what we Marxists have always said they are: ad hoc creations designed to codify the real political, social and economic balance of power. The Supreme Court showed brilliantly, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, that those with the power can make the "laws" mean anything they want them to mean. For at least 30 years the U.S. has been locked in a class war, except that, by and large, only one side has been fighting. In Seattle, however, in late 1999, something changed; something got out of the bottle which has never been put back in. The one-note chorus of politicians, "experts", the media and business elites praising "globalization" in "public debate" was rudely interrupted. Working people in the U.S. saw in the streets what many working people in other parts of the world have known for a long time: that this is a global crisis, and that the forces shaping "American" realities are no longer (and have never really been) "American", and have to be confronted where they really operate: ON A WORLD SCALE. In addition to what has happened in the U.S., the world crisis since the early 1970's has devastated Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia, and much of Asia (and most recently ex-Soviet Central Asia). China is in the midst of laying off 100 million workers to prepare for its full entry into the "global economy", once the bureaucrats can figure out what to do with the 800 million Chinese, both workers and peasants, who are seeing their meager livelihoods destroyed in the process. Indonesia has been thrown by the 1997-98 Asian meltdown into massive retrogression. The IMF, World Bank and other institutions controlled by the U.S. have been using these crises to force open the European and above all Asian economies to the Anglo-American techniques of looting that have wreaked their havoc in the U.S. (from Reagan to Clinton) and the U.K. (from Thatcher to Blair): mergers, downsizing, hollowing-out, "corporate governance", junk bonds, LBO's, savaging of the social safety net, massive layoffs and "redundancies", and the destruction of the productive base of the economy through debt-pyramiding and stock-market delirium. In the coming months and years, it will become even clearer, in the U.S., what a pathetic house of cards the "American" economy has become during the Clinton-Gore years of "prosperity". Nevertheless, the capitalists, their politicians and the chattering classes will do everything in their power to make sure that the house collapses on us.=20 We don't care about Bush or Gore or Nader. We don't care about elections. We care about building a revolutionary transnational movement of working people to put an end to the capitalist system world-wide, before it puts an end to us. We are handing out this leaflet to meet like-minded people. For too long the opposition to the scenario sketched above, particularly in the U.S., has used words like "globalism" to avoid calling the system by its real name: capitalism. If we call the system capitalism, then we make it clear that the solution to the system's crisis is socialism, or communism, and we recast the strategic discussion in terms that the dominant system, as well as many of its opponents, such as Nader, are there to suppress. We are aware that the words "socialism" and "communism" have been emptied, over the past 100 years, by meaning the opposite of what they are in fact. Nothing we can say in one leaflet will correct that. But we can outline briefly what a transnational movement of working people will do immediately when it has replaced the the political and economic power of capital with its own social revolution and the appropriate institutions of working-class power. The first task is to break the "negative sum game" (the "race to the bottom" of the world labor market) with a positive sum game. This means abolishing the U.S.-based world financial system and wiping the slate clean of debt. If working people achieve power--a revolution-- first in a country like the U.S., this elementary world reorganization can be combined with a rapid transition in the U.S. itself: 1) abolition of the 50-odd million jobs (state and corporate bureaucracy, military, law enforcement and prisons, etc.) that exist because the system is capitalist 2) a large-scale retraining of such people for useful work 3) wherever possible, automation of the remaining mind-numbing necessary work 4) a massive program of export to the underdeveloped world, to equalize world living standards upward instead of downward, as capitalism is doing, and 5) a rapid, radical shortening of the working day, as quickly as the implementation of 1-4 permits.=20 This is a minimal program for the early phase of a successful working-class revolution, which obviously will have to become world-wide, or perish. These programmatic points are important to mention because the dominant world has for so long been spouting the groupthink that, as Margaret Thatcher put it so bluntly, "there is no alternative". We can say little or nothing here about the positive content of what such a large-scale freeing of creative power implies for social life. We can say even less about the arduous process of getting from here to there. But, as someone said back in 1968, "the society which has abolished all adventure makes its own abolition the last possible adventure".=20 =09 Chronicles from the Class = War Check out our web site at:=20 http://www.chroniclesfromtheclasswar=20 E-mail us at:(E-MAIL ADDRESS HERE) or write to us at: Queequeg PO Box 672355 Bronx NY 10467 =20 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - Buy the things you want at great prices.=20 http://auctions.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
