Is Revolution Possible in the US ?

ONE SEGMENT of progressives reacted to George Bush’s victory in the 2004 presidential election with despair.
“Maybe this time,” Nation magazine columnist Katha Pollitt commented bitterly, “the voters chose what they actually want: Nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, ‘safety’ through torture, backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway president.”

Liberal author Garry Wills concluded that “Enlightenment values” have been abandoned in the U.S.—and that the vote was driven by “the fundamentalism of the American electorate.” A Progressive magazine editorial singled out “the American superiority complex, a profound affliction that distorts our perceptions and enables manipulative presidents to give the marching orders.”

Such pronouncements fit with the corporate media’s take on the election—that the rural backwaters rose up against the cities, that Bush’s appeal to “moral values” and social conservatism was the secret of his success and so on.

Actually, these claims are mostly wrong. For example, the much-hyped statistic that 22 percent of voters said “moral values” was their prime concern turns out to be the same result as the last three presidential elections, according to the Los Angeles Times—including two that were won by a Democrat. And Bush’s biggest gains over his showing in 2000 came not in rural areas, but urban centers—that is, the places where John Kerry should have been strongest.

That’s the real secret of Bush’s success—the fact that Kerry and the Democrats didn’t give people reasons to vote for them.

Still, the election result will have led some people to wonder if a revolution to overturn the power of a minority ruling class and establish a new system based on democracy and equality—has not proved unrealistic.

Election 2004 was a lifeless non-debate between the candidates of two pro-capitalist parties who shared more in common than they differed on. A revolution is about political debate thriving in every corner of society—and masses of people taking action to use their collective power to set entirely new priorities. Comparing the two is like comparing a bushel of apples and an orange grove.
– - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BUT ISN’T it foolish to talk about a revolution in the United States in the first place?
Actually, the question isn’t whether a revolution can take place in the U.S. It’s whether another revolution can take place—America has already had two.

One of the strangest things about the U.S. is the fact that its political leaders are committed to social order and the rule of law—yet they regularly celebrate the origins of this country in a bloody revolution that declared independence from British rule. The American Revolution wasn’t accomplished by signing the Declaration of Independence, but through mass resistance and a years-long war of liberation.

The revolution ended in the establishment of a radically new system of representative government and probably the widest democracy known anywhere in the world to that point. The new United States wasn’t consistently democratic—above all, the bloody crime of slavery was left untouched. But it was a revolutionary advance over what came before it.

The U.S. experienced another social revolution 90 years later—the Civil War of 1861-65, which destroyed the Southern system of slavery.

The importance of this war is covered over today by myths about the generals who fought it, nonsense about “Southern culture” and other trivia. In reality, by freeing the slaves, the Civil War marked the largest expropriation of private property at any time in world history.

Credit for this revolutionary outcome usually goes to Abraham Lincoln and perhaps a few army generals. But this ignores the role played by countless other people. Black slaves themselves played a crucial part in the struggle, as did the agitators of the abolitionist movement in the North. So did the soldiers of the Northern army, who fought and died to defeat the Confederacy.

These weren’t socialist revolutions. Both left the capitalist system of private property altered, but intact. But no one can claim that the War of 1776 and the Civil War didn’t fundamentally transform American society—and not gradually either, but in one great convulsion.

The century and a half since has also been marked by enormous upheavals. In 1919, for example, in the aftermath of the slaughter of the First World War and despite a right-wing hysteria whipped up against immigrants and radicals, the U.S. was swept by an unprecedented strike wave that involved one in every five workers.

The high point was the Seattle general strike of 1919. More than 100,000 workers—in a city of 250,000—honored a call by the Seattle Central Labor Council for a general strike to stop the bosses of the city’s huge shipyards from breaking the union. Suddenly, Seattle was paralyzed—its rulers powerless to re-impose order. But even more impressive was the way workers organized to provide essential services during the strike—essentially running the city collectively through a General Strike Committee made up of representatives from the striking locals.

There are other examples from 20th-century America. The 1930s was the decade of the Great Depression, when millions of families were plunged into poverty and desperation. But it was also the decade when workers won unionization in basic industries.

The 1950s are remembered for McCarthyism and the anti-communist witch-hunts. But they were also the years when the formative struggles of the civil rights movement took place. In the decade that followed, this movement rose up to smash the apartheid system of Jim Crow segregation in the South—and inspire other struggles that shook American society to the core, from the movement against the U.S. war on Vietnam, to the women’s movement, to the struggle for gay and lesbian rights.

– - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The American Dream is dead today. The last 25 years have seen a huge shift in income distribution in favor of the very richest Americans. In the four years since a recession began in early 2001, median household income has declined once inflation is taken into account.

For those who were always stuck with the short end of the stick, conditions are worse. African Americans continue to suffer an unemployment rate twice as high as the national average—while bearing the brunt of the politicians’ law-and-order incarceration boom. Meanwhile, many of the reforms won as a result of the civil rights and Black Power movements—from affirmative action to overcome discrimination, to poverty programs to give a small leg up to the most vulnerable—are being dismantled but fast.

Given all this, it would absurd to claim that U.S. workers are content with their deteriorating living standards today—much less the more violent, war-filled and polluted world they live in.

Opinion polls show that ordinary Americans are far from devoted to the priorities of the Bush administration. One survey by the Wall Street Journal, for example, found that more than half of those asked would be willing to pay $2,000 a year extra in taxes to guarantee health care for those who don’t have access to it. The same sentiment exists around funding for public education.

There’s no reason to believe that working people have been hoodwinked into accepting declining standards of living. And the truth is that these conditions are growing worse over time, not better, and with no sign of a turnaround.- - - - - - - -

When struggles do emerge and link up, they can develop with remarkable speed. This was the case, for example, when the Teamsters went on strike against UPS in 1997. In the midst of the so-called “miracle economy,” the mainstream media were forced to stop their happy talk and investigate the issues of corporate greed and declining living standards that the strike brought to center stage.

On a bigger scale, something similar can be said about the high points of struggle in U.S. history. The great labor uprising of the 1930s was preceded by the 1920s—when the ruling class was on the offensive, and the established labor movement seemed to be bankrupt and dying. Likewise, the radicalism of the 1960s was preceded by the conservatism of the 1950s.

Importantly, the civil rights struggles of the 1960s were born years earlier with lesser-known fights, involving modest numbers of people, initiated during a period we remember as profoundly conservative. For the individuals who were willing to make their voices heard, there was no guarantee that they would eventually defeat Jim Crow. On the contrary, the racist system appeared to be all-powerful, capable of defeating all challenges. But it was defeated—and history was made.

The media love to heap contempt on the struggles of the 1960s today. But they are proof that ideas can change with enormous speed. In periods of such upheavals, millions upon millions of people who focused their energy on other things suddenly turn their attention to the question of transforming society.

This is what makes revolution possible—mass participation. The caricature of revolution passed off by many historians is of a small group of armed fanatics seizing control of the government and running it to enrich themselves. But this has nothing to do with genuine change The decisive moment of any real revolution comes, when masses of people “break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime.”

Fraudulent elections raise deeper questions, and people begin to see the connections between the struggles that they’re involved in and other issues—and the nature of the system itself.

Given the history of this country, it would be foolish to claim that revolution is impossible— however passive the media portrayal of society is.

Revolution is not only possible in the United States, but it’s absolutely necessary and urgently needed to put an end to poverty, war and oppression—and create a new society dedicated to justice and freedom.