Most folks less than 60 years old have grown up under a steady and relentless barrage of anti-communist propaganda. This attack was powerful and unyielding because it was tightly linked to a steadily rising standard of living throughout the country. When thinking and activity are linked with economic rewards to all classes and various layers within classes, we all become more or less, like Pavlov's dog. _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov) The American peoples are caught in the conditional reflex of Pavlov's dog. Anti-communism fed a generation and economic crisis is undoing the past 60 years of conditional reflex at a remarkable pace. Pavlov would hit his dog and fed him and the dog came to associate being hit with being fed. When the dog was hit once and not fed he returned to be hit again. The American working class knows it is being hit and hurt and are not being fed. They are still at a stage of understanding where they attempt to salvage what they might have by blaming anything or anyone for the ills of capitalism. The populist clamoring and penning away about the banks and greedy bankers is designed to obscure the question of class and teaching our class why it must slowly but surely look at all things from the lens of the interest of the working class. At the pace the crisis is deepening in our country, a growing rate of job loss running as high as 650,000 newly unemployed for the past 6 months, our country will be in serious crisis, if this rate continues for the rest of the year. Further, if the crisis continues for the next 24 - 36 months we are talking about a fundamental dislocation of American society. This crisis is different according to every single analysis on the left and right. Today, 3-9-09, the UAW agreed to freezing wages at the Ford Motor Company and cutting retiree benefits. Upwards of 20,000 people a day lose their job. Today we are facing the social consequence of the revolution in the productive forces and the permanent displacement of another layer of the working class. We must understand that the new American Revolution is already underway. The economic, objective side is already in revolution. No one can stop the application of more efficient means of production replacing the less efficient. In the case of auto the development of new plants and retooling is slated to cut the workforce in half, along with cutting wages in half. The people are asking themselves and their leaders, "What has gone wrong with the country?" The leaders have no answers other than to blame the victims or to finger point at Wall Street greed and individuals. Thus, we find the people themselves blaming the victims. This time around, however, provides conscious revolutionaries with a window of opportunity, through which we can struggle for the hearts and minds of the people. Understanding the this crisis is different and the fundamentals have changed is of decisive importance. Anti-communist ideology united with a rising standard of living is one thing. Anti-communism linked with a declining standard of living is a different matter altogether. Since advanced robotics and the new technological regime has become an obvious fixture of the American society, and the capitalist must fire people permanently to realize profits, the recover of profitability will only add another layer of the unemployed and homeless to the last period of crisis of 2000. Roughly 10 years ago the restoration of profitability was officially called "the jobless recovery." "Jobless recovery" and returning veterans from the war against the people of Iraq is a volatile combination. This understanding lays dormant within the heart and minds of the American people, waiting to be awakened and kindled by the communists. In a remarkable way we, at a higher level, the various leaders in the mass movement today, and the communists propagandists, find themselves in much the same situation that faced the same folks of the 1946-7 period. At that time a new economic era was dawning. American imperialism could and did dominate a world devastated by war. The established leaders - communists of all kinds, didn't and couldn't understand the significance of the new period. It was a political shock to see the great movement for civil and labor rights that had been built up during 1930's and during WW II collapse and be taken over by forces hostile to the former aims of the movement. Irresistible forces were coming into play and the leadership had to either adapt to the new era or be crushed by it. The communists did not change and was crushed and marginalized. The strength of degenerate trade union leaders like Walter Reuther was not in his oratory or organizing skill, but rather the strength of American imperialism and the unheard of expansion of productive capacity. Reuther could bring home the bacon and did. By the time the magnificent struggles of the Negro masses broke forward in the mid 1950s, a tremendous political and ideological vacuum existed and out of this movement would emerge a new student movement and then a "young Communists Movement" more than less detached from the past. Some - not all, of the fault resided clearly with the communists who could not change and fight for the unity of their political pole on the basis of the daily struggles of the Negro masses. Yes, powerful social forces were aligned against all of us, but there is never an excuse for abandoning the Marxist standpoint. Even the countless sectarian errors was of a historical character and unavoidable, given the passivity of a huge section of the workers. Further, an entire section of communism went over to a section of the movement buttressed and expressing the Negro bourgeoisie. This in turn deepened the political vacuum in the Negro Peoples Movement at the exact moment that the movement shifted into what was then called "the black worker insurgency." Out of this insurgency emerged various political grouping and what is now today and 50 ish and 60 ish generation of communists. Today is fundamentally different. Capitalism has reached its historical limit, and the American people intuitively sense something is drastically wrong. Today we are in a new epoch of social revolution. A new qualitative stage of history is unfolding in front of us. The reason the bourgeois economists, and no one else knows how deep the rabbit hole of crisis goes down, is because "no one knows." Talk about recovery is nonsense. Restoration of profitability does not = recovery for the working class. This is not a quantitative stage of the old process or old period or a repeat of the Roosevelt era. The mills of history sometimes grind slowly, but this changed situation we face today is fundamental and bound up with the changes in the productive forces. First the slow grind and then the leap, or transition in the social struggle and the emergence of new social forces in the blink of an eye . . . 12 months or 24 months or 36! The Obama campaign unto itself and then his election shock the entire country and the world. The working class right now is ready for its next advance. No one knows exactly what to do. Except the communists and what we must do is be communists and steer clear of social democratic demagogy. Whether we like it or not or fully understand it or not, the movement will falter and fail and not even achieve its present limited goals without us discovering the means to bring the theoretical and ideological clarity to the new emerging revolutionaries. This is the only link in the chain of events that will not and cannot develop spontaneously. Conscious revolutionaries have to bring in the conscious link, and when we do so, we will have become an integral part of the new American revolution. And we will do the very thing all of us were born to do. Unite or Perish! But . . . unite as communists. WL. **************Need a job? Find employment help in your area. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000005)
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