Red Star: Socialism or barbarism

If you want to preserve capitalism and inequality, drastic measures will be necessary for social control and the entrenchment of privilege. Given ecological collapse, social atomization and the privatization of public space, there’s little room left for capitalism to expand. War, exclusion and genocide are the logical ends of the American ideology and the self-interest of capital. This is what the coming decades hold.

That’s a long way of saying we now face a choice: socialism or barbarism.

Neoliberalism was the way out for a while, cutting labor costs and allowing corporations to pursue rent-seeking behavior while simultaneously lowering their tax burdens. But the last ten years have demonstrated that neoliberalism returns nothing to a working person. You may have a cell phone, but rent is half your income, and the rest is medical debt. The electoral success of Sanders and Trump reveals that the middle way is broken, and the people understand this at a base level, even if columnists and pharmaceutical heirs do not.

Paul Krugman writes, “unemployment declined despite not-so-fast growth is a sign that growth will be a lot slower going forward.” The millions of unemployed workers who made a recovery for the owning class possible in the Obama era are now back at work. There’s no untapped reserve. Union weakness also means that the working class can’t enforce the social democratic bargain that the Sanders Democrats want.

Growth, or rather accumulation of wealth, and profit need cheaper or more productive labor. Wages are low, and productivity stagnant.

Ecologically, temperatures are rising, nearly a third of arable land has disappeared, fish stocks are collapsing and clean water is still inaccessible to hundreds of millions of people. The ecological basis of infinite accumulation is almost gone.

There are two solutions.

The first option is increasing reaction, evermore walls, evermore prisons, ever fewer unions, less public space, destroying what little material barriers exist against the far right until eventually, not next year, but maybe in thirty years, the capitalist class pushes hyper-exploitation on us with the power of the nationalist right. In that choice, hyper-surveilled wage labor, nationalist purification, racial violence and slave labor are the natural outcomes of a drive to push labor costs lower and protect the privilege and accumulation of billionaires and the relative position of comfortable whites.

The alt-right understands this. This is the point of far-right politics: privilege, property and nation. The armed fascists in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us" act to psychologically prepare the rest of the political system for the horrific violence necessary to preserve American supremacy and the profits of big business.

The other choice, my choice, is socialism. Democratic ownership of the workplace, the redistribution of property and profits, the creation of public space and infrastructure, the end of imperial war and exploitation, the replacement of racist power structures with reparations and egalitarian social relations, and ecologically sustainable planning are the elements of 21st century socialism. Over the next weeks I will present a socialist critique of current issues and concrete examples of socialist policy and values. My project is to ready us for the struggle for equality.

We have not yet begun to fight. But they have.