What is Socialism?

by Gordon Schultz

http://www.socialistaction.org/revolution.htm

The German socialist Karl Marx was once asked what his favorite maxim was. He replied with a line by the Roman playwright Terence: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man, is a matter of indifference to me."If for the moment we ignore the use of sexist language in this ancient quotation, we get a feel for the profoundly humanitarian spirit of Marx and socialists since him.Indeed, socialists are very concerned about the injustice and social ills in the world today—hunger, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, disease, war, the exploitation of workers, the oppression of nations, races, women, and gays, the destruction of the environment, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.Socialists obviously don't have a monopoly on compassion, however. What distinguishes socialists from other socially concerned people is that we do not view these problems as normal, natural, eternal, or an inherent feature of the human condition. We believe that these problems are historically and socially created and that they can be solved by human beings through conscious, organized political struggle and change.Socialist Action argues that the wealth and other advances produced by industry, technology, and science have made it possible to eliminate these problems but that these problems continue because of the dominant economic and political interests and values of society. We assert that capitalism is ultimately the main source of these problems in the United States and the world today.Capitalism and the exploitation of workersUnder capitalism, the chief means of production—the factories, the railroads, the mines, the banks, the public utilities, the offices, and all of the related technology—are privately owned by a super-rich minority, the capitalist class. The capitalists then compete with each other in the marketplace and run production on the basis of what will bring them the biggest profit.This drive to successfully compete and to maximize profit leads big business to exploit workers, to pay their employees as little as possible, a mere fraction of the actual value that they produce. It also leads big business to resist the efforts of workers to unionize and to obtain increased pay, reduced working hours, and improved working conditions.This exploitation of workers results in a gross concentration of wealth, to the benefit of the capitalists and at the expense of working people. Even in the United States, the richest country in the world, where workers admittedly have one of the highest living standards, there is nonetheless a gross concentration of wealth. According to the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, the top 1% of American families (834,000 households) own more than the bottom 90% (84 million households).This social inequality is aggravated by mass unemployment, which is endemic to capitalism. Because the means of production is divided up among the individual capitalists competing with each other, there is no overall coordination or planning of the economy and consequently no consideration to provide jobs to everybody who is able and willing to work.This anarchy of production for private profit also fuels the erratic boom-and-bust cycle of the capitalist economy. Periodically, the economy experiences crises of overproduction when the capitalists inadvertently glut the market with products that they cannot sell at a profit. The result is recessions and massive layoffs of workers, which ruin lives, idle factories, and deprive society of the benefits of production.The basic irrationality of capitalism is highlighted by the glaring gap between unmet human needs on one hand and the untapped potential of the existing human and material resources to fulfill these needs on the other. For example, when inventors or scientists or technicians develop new, advanced labor-saving technology, this should be a cause for celebration for workers because it means that the work week could be cut with no cut in weekly pay. Workers could enjoy greater leisure time without a drop in income. Instead, the capitalists use labor-saving technology to lay off workers because, of course, it only makes good sense from the business point of view to cut labor costs in order to increase profits.In the United States, there is a great need for a massive construction of more schools, hospitals, child-care centers, and recreation centers. There is also a great need to repair the nation's deteriorating infrastructure, including its roads, bridges, mass transit, and water systems. The capital, raw materials, and labor for such development exists, but the corporate rich do not invest in such projects because they correctly judge that it would not be profitable for them to do so. The potential, overwhelmingly working-class consumers of such services simply would not be able to afford the prices that big business would have to charge in order to make a profit.Nor does the capitalist government finance such a massive expansion as part of a public works program, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it would raise the public's expectation, which is basically at odds with capitalist ideology, that society should be responsible to provide for its members. And secondly, it would raise the possibility that the public would force the government to tax the rich to fund such an expensive program.The oppression of African-Americans and HispanicsIn addition to exploiting workers, capitalism contributes to the oppression of other groups in society. White racism and the oppression of African-Americans arose with the European slave trade, but they have been perpetuated under capitalism.After the slaves were freed during the Civil War, the capitalists used racism to justify paying less to Black employees. The capitalists also used racism to pit white workers against Black workers in order to divide the working class and weaken the organized labor movement. Despite the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, white racist discrimination in employment and in other areas of life persists.Furthermore, the second-class status of African-Americans has been deepened by color-blind free market forces, specifically by the recent movement of industry out of the cities, where the Black community is concentrated. The resulting loss of decent-paying working-class jobs has increased Black poverty and devastated Black neighborhoods and families, fueling crime, drug addiction, and hopelessness.The oppression of Hispanics in the United states is similar to that of African-Americans in that it is based on widespread racist discrimination, combined with a decline in the number of available decent-paying jobs. The Anglo suppression of various aspects of Latin culture and identity worsens the plight of Hispanics in this country.The oppression of women and gaysWhile the oppression of women predated the establishment of capitalism, the private profit system has perpetuated their subordination to men. The main basis of women's oppression in capitalist society is the segregation of women in lower paying jobs in the labor market and the relegation of women to unequally shared child care and housework in the family.These two spheres of women's oppression—the labor market and the family—are mutually reinforcing. So long as women are unduly burdened by child care and housework, they will not be able to gain equality with men in employment. So long as women bring home a smaller paycheck, they will not be able to get their male partners to share domestic responsibilities equally.These unequal labor relations between men and women sustain the sexist ideology that justifies different and unequal gender roles and the rigid, polarized norms for males and females in all aspects of life.The oppression of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals is largely derived from this sexist ideology. Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are stigmatized because they defy the norm of exclusive heterosexuality and because they do not conform to conventional standards of masculinity and femininity.Imperialism and U.S. foreign policyOn an international level, capitalism has led to the development of imperialism. Since the nineteenth century, the corporate rich of the advanced industrialized capitalist nations of Western Europe, the United States, and Japan have invested capital and exploited cheap labor and natural resources in the colonial world of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.The economic domination of the imperialist nations has distorted the development of the Third World nations, condemning the masses of their populations to poverty and misery. The rivalry between the imperialist nations has also led to military conflicts, including two world wars, as they competed for new world markets and carved up the world. Since the Second World War, the imperialist nations have been forced to grant most of their former colonies formal political independence, but their economic domination continues.Since its victory in World War II, the United States has been the leading imperialist power. At various points over the past fifty years, the U.S. government has defended American corporate interests abroad by supporting such repressive, undemocratic governments as the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in Spain, the apartheid regime in South Africa, the shah of Iran, the Marcos dictatorship of the Philippines, and the recently deposed Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia.The U.S. government has also gone to war or used other forms of military intervention to defend big business interests, such as in Korea in the '50s, Cuba in the '60s, Vietnam in the '60s and '70s, Nicaragua in the '80s, and Iraq in the '90s. The U.S. imperialists have also overthrown democratically elected reform governments that encroached on U.S. corporate privilege, such as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Chile in 1973.Additionally, the United States dropped the atom bomb in World War II and launched the arms race with the Soviet Union—all to intimidate the Soviet Union and to deter the people of the colonial world from challenging imperialist domination and going the route of socialist revolution.The socialist solutionSocialist Action argues that the problems of exploitation and oppression in the world today can ultimately be solved by first replacing the capitalist system with a socialist system. The chief means of production should be socialized, that is, taken out of the private hands of the capitalists and put under public ownership, that is, government ownership.The economy should then be run by councils of democratically elected representatives of workers and consumers at all levels of the economy. Instead of being run on the basis of what will maximize profit for a super-rich minority, the economy should be planned to meet the needs of the people—in employment, education, nutrition, health care, housing, transportation, leisure, and cultural development.A socialist government could raise the minimum wage to union levels, cut the work week with no cut in weekly pay, and spread around the newly available work to the unemployed. A public works program, such as the one mentioned earlier, could be launched to provide yet more jobs and offer sorely needed social services. The government could provide free health care, from cradle to grave, and free education, from nursery school to graduate school.A socialist government could also address the special needs and interests of the oppressed. Existing anti-discrimination legislation in employment could be strongly enforced, and pay equity and affirmative action for women and racial minorities could be expanded. Blacks and Hispanics could be granted community control of their respective communities. The racist, class-biased death penalty could be abolished.The establishment of flexible working hours, paid parental leave, and child-care facilities, as well as the defense of safe, legal and accessible abortion, would provide women with alternatives to sacrificing work for the sake of their children and because of unwanted pregnancies, respectively. Same-sex marriage could be legalized, and a massive program, like the space program or the Manhattan Project, could be financed to find a vaccine and a cure for AIDS.Money currently spent on the military could be spent instead on cleaning up the country's air and waterways and developing environmentally safe technology. A socialist government of the United States would end this country's oppression of Third World nations because it would not be defending corporate profit there but would be encouraging the workers and peasants of those countries to follow suit and make their own socialist revolutions.The socialist system that Socialist Action advocates would be a multiparty system, with all of the democratic rights won and enjoyed in the most democratic capitalist nations, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. A genuinely socialist system would be far more democratic than the most democratic capitalist system because in a socialist economy the common working people would democratically decide what should be produced and how it should be produced.Social democracy and StalinismMany people often ask Socialist Action if we support the model of socialism offered by the social democratic parties and government administrations in Western European nations. We say "no."In those countries, the Labor, Social Democratic, and Socialist parties have helped their working-class constituencies to win important progressive reforms, such as universal suffrage, the eight-hour day, old-age pensions, free health care and education, and social services more extensive than those here in the United States. However, these parties and the trade unions affiliated with them have secured these reforms within the capitalist framework, which they have never fundamentally challenged or sought to replace with socialism. Therefore, the capitalists' rule of the economy, their exploitation of the working class, and the resulting concentration of wealth continue.People also ask us if the so-called Communist countries of the former Soviet bloc represented the model of socialism that we support. Again, as with the Social Democrats, our answer is "no."In the former Soviet bloc, the capitalist class was expropriated, and the economies were socialized. These socialized economies made possible great progress in raising the living standards of the masses of workers and peasants in the areas of employment, health care, education, and nutrition, and in upgrading the status of women. However, these countries were ruled through the Communist parties by privileged bureaucratic elites that denied socialist democracy and imposed repressive, totalitarian political systems on the people. These dictatorial governments not only violated basic democratic and human rights but mismanaged the planned economies, being responsible for inefficiency, waste, corruption, and stagnation.The origins of these dictatorial bureaucratic regimes lie with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the two leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, Leon Trotsky, argued that the Bolshevik model of socialist democracy was never fully implemented and then was completely destroyed under the Stalin dictatorship because of a combination of factors. These factors included the failure of the socialist revolutions to triumph in Europe after the First World War, the resulting isolation of the Russian Revolution, the military attacks on the young Soviet republic by the imperialist nations, the devastation caused by the First World War and the Civil War that followed the revolution, the lack of democratic traditions in czarist Russia, and the general low educational and cultural levels of the masses of workers and peasants.Currently, in the former Soviet bloc nations, the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies, allied with the Western imperialists and native capitalist "wannabes," are trying to restore capitalism. So far, the introduction of the free market into the Soviet bloc has resulted in a gigantic drop in productivity and in the living standards of common working people, with increasing unemployment, poverty, and social inequality.This right-wing attempt to restore capitalism and the corresponding attacks on social services and entitlements, such as free health care and full employment, in the former Soviet bloc have also made it easier for the capitalist governments of Western Europe to attack the various reforms and social services that the labor movements and social democratic parties of those countries have won over the past decades.Socialist Action hailed the collapse of the repressive Communist Party regimes of the Soviet bloc, but we oppose the restoration of capitalism there. Instead, we call for a defense of the socialized economies and for the workers and their allies to overthrow the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies and establish socialist democracy in their place.Socialism and human natureMany critics say that socialism is a great idea in theory but that it is completely unrealistic and utopian because it goes against basic human nature. The critics claim that human beings are just too selfish, too greedy, too competitive, and too aggressive to create and sustain a cooperative and egalitarian society.Socialists recognize that individual self-interest has always existed and will always exist in human beings. We also acknowledge that there will never be a perfect harmony between the individual and society.But we argue that individual self-interest need not be the ruling principle of society. History and cross-cultural research suggest that basic human nature consists of many different, divergent, but co-existing capacities, and that human personality and behavior are largely shaped by the social institutions, practices, and ruling ideology of the given society.The critics of socialism correctly perceive the hyper-individualism of people in capitalist society, but then they incorrectly generalize this historically specific characteristic to human beings across time and place. They cannot imagine or understand that a reorganization of society along socialist lines would elicit, facilitate, and reinforce the basic human capacities for cooperation and solidarity.The revolutionary potential of workers & the oppressedStill, the point about self-interest as a motivating factor for human behavior is an important one. Socialists believe that many people of conscience from different classes and backgrounds can be won to a socialist perspective through appeals to reason, morality, and political idealism. However, we believe that the main impetus for a socialist movement to sustain itself and successfully transform society must be collective self-interest and power.We believe that the working class is the only social force that has both the necessary self-interest and power to lead the struggle for socialism. Socialism is in the interests of the working class because it will allow the workers to reclaim the wealth that they produced but which the capitalists appropriated from them through exploitation. The working class also has the power to overturn capitalism because of its strategic location at the point of production and its corresponding ability to shut down production by simply withdrawing its labor. Thus, a mass socialist movement can only grow out of a revitalized and radicalized labor movement, based on the trade unions and other organizations of the working class.Similarly, we believe that only the oppressed possess sufficient self-interest to lead the struggles for their own liberation. Therefore, we support the autonomous movements of the oppressed--the Black movement, the Hispanic movement, the women's movement, and the gay and lesbian movement--to insure that their respective needs and demands are met.However, we do not believe that the oppressed by themselves possess sufficient power to fully achieve their liberation since their oppression is at least partly rooted in the capitalist system. Because only the organized working class possesses sufficient power to abolish capitalism and its concomitant forms of oppression, the oppressed must win the organized working class to support their respective struggles, as well as ultimately ally themselves with the working class in the struggle for socialism.Independent mass actionSocialist Action does not believe that socialism can be voted into power through free elections. History has repeatedly shown that when workers and their allies try to use the existing democratic process to advance their interests and replace capitalism with a socialist system, the capitalist class and the armed forces of the capitalist state will smash democracy to save capitalism, as happened, for example, in Chile twenty-five years ago this month.Socialist Action points out that progressive social change has been made in this country through mass action, not by voting in certain politicians or by working within the system.American independence from England was gained through a revolution. The passage of the Bill of Rights was prompted by a rebellion of poor farmers. The abolition of slavery and the extension of suffrage to Black men was accomplished through a second revolution, the Civil War. Women won the vote through the women's suffrage movement.The labor movement won the twelve-hour day, then the eight-hour day, the right to strike, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker's disability. Social Security, welfare, and increased wages and benefits for union members.The civil rights movement overthrew the segregationist "Jim Crow" laws of the South and forced the government to outlaw racist discrimination in employment and housing and to implement affirmative action.The anti-war movement helped force the U.S. to end its imperialist war against the Vietnamese in their just struggle for self-determination.The feminist movement won anti-discrimination legislation, affirmative action, pay equity in some public institutions, and the legalization of abortion.The gay and lesbian movement, too, has secured anti-discrimination legislation and greater funding of AIDS research and patient care.Additionally, the environmental and consumer protection movements have won important reforms that moderate big business's destruction of the planet and manufacture of unsafe commodities in its relentless pursuit of profits.Socialist Action advocates the independent political action of the workers and the oppressed to bring about further progressive change. We call for and build mass demonstrations, rallies, pickets, and strikes.We counter-pose such mass action to reliance on the American two-party system, electoral campaigns, and behind-the scenes lobbying of capitalist politicians. The logic of working within the two-party system of the capitalist political establishment is to subordinate the needs, demands, and priorities of the workers and the oppressed to what is acceptable to the rulers of this country. The inevitable result is the demobilization and cooptation of the struggle for change.We point out that the impetus for progressive social change has never come from the Democratic and Republican parties but that they can be forced by mass action to implement progressive policies and reforms, at least up to certain limits. However, we argue that socialism can only be achieved by a revolutionary culmination of mass action of the workers and their allies in opposition to the capitalist state and capitalist political parties.Socialist Action aspires to play a leading role in building a popular mass socialist movement in this country. Our members have participated in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the environmental movement, the Central America solidarity movement, and the movement against the Gulf War, among others.If you want to fight for a society and a world free of all forms of exploitation, oppression, and social injustice, join us!

How to Make a Revolution
by Peter Camejo

*The essay below was first given as a speech by Young Socialist Alliance leader Peter Camejo in New York on May 3, 1969.Revolutionary socialists have been accused for many years of wanting to overthrow the U.S. government by force and violence. When they accuse us of this, what they are really trying to do is imply that we want to abolish capitalism with a minority, that we want to force the will of the minority on the majority. The opposite is the truth. We believe we can win a majority of the people in this country to support a change in the system. It will be necessary to make a revolution precisely because the ruling powers will not peacefully accept a majority rule which wants a basic change. How can a revolution involving a majority of the people actually take place in the United States? This is the question I want to discuss today. First of all, you have to have clear in your mind the meaning of the word “revolution.” Many people have a stereotyped picture of what a revolution is like. They say a revolution is when people come with guns, when they surround a fortress or take over a city. What they do is they confuse revolution with insurrection. Insurrection is just one stage of revolution. Revolution is a lot more. It’s a long process. In a certain way you can make a parallel between revolution and pregnancy. In the very early stages of pregnancy, if just on empirical evidence you ask whether or not someone is pregnant, the answer will be no. However, with the use of science you can determine whether the person is pregnant very early. Later on it becomes evident for everybody to see. The same thing is true of social revolution. In the early stages most people don’t see it. You always begin on the assumption that in every society that needs a revolution, the majority of the people don’t think it’s possible. This is most certainly true for the period of American history we are in right now. We’re in the early stages of the third American revolution. I say the third revolution because we’ve had two others - the revolution of 1776 and the Civil War. The ContradictionsWhy is it that we are in the early stages of a developing revolutionary situation? The reason is most basically because of the contradiction between the fantastic potential for solving human needs in this society and the existing reality. Let me explain: Everything you see, everything you ear or wear, your car, your housing – you didn’t make any of these things. We don’t produce these things as individuals. We produce socially. We have a division of work in the United States, and in the whole world for that matter. People in one part of the world make things which people in another part of the world use. But, even though we produce socially, through cooperation, we don’t own the means of production socially. And this affects all the basic decisions made in this society about what we produce. These decisions are not made on the basis of what people need, but on the basis of what makes a profit. Take the question of hunger. There are people going hungry all over the world, and the U.S. government recently reported that there are a lot of people going hungry right here in the United States. And yet, because of the profit system, the U.S. government is now paying farmers not to farm. Farmers don’t make their decisions by saying, “We need a lot of corn in the U.S., so I’m going to plant a lot of corn.” They never say that. They say, “How much money am I going to make if I plant corn?” Did you know that if decisions were not made on this basis, then the U.S. alone would have the potential to feed the whole world? The economic potential is there. Take the question of housing. If you took just the money that’s spent on the war in Vietnam, you could build beautiful free homes for every nonwhite family in the U.S. and for 30 million of the poorest whites. They could wipe out every slum in the next four years. The potential exists, not only in the factories and the materials for building, but in the potential to build new machines and factories. Yet, they are not going to solve the housing question because it’s not profitable to build low cost housing. Did you know that because of the way the system is structured a large percentage of the people do not do any productive work at all? You have the unemployed who are not hired because it’s not profitable to hire them. They you have the people in the Army, not to mention the police, and others who consume a great deal but don’t produce anything. Then you have things like the people in the advertising industry. They don’t do anything really useful or necessary. In addition, you have a mammoth, organized effort to create waste. For instance, if you designed a car for the Ford company that would last 50 years, they wouldn’t use it. Because that would destroy the purpose of making cars, which is to produce profits. I’ll give you another example of how the potential for meeting human needs is destroyed because of the profit system. Say you are a capitalist, and you’re about to build a factory. Do you say, “I’ll build it where it’s nice, where there are trees and fresh air, and where the workers will have nice homes and will be able to go mountain climbing or hunting or swimming”? No, that’s not the way you think. You say, “Well, where’s my market, where are my raw materials coming in, how can I make the most profit?” And this means you might build the factory where you will pump even more poison into the air. Smog is another example of a problem which stems directly from the system. Remember when they first discovered smog. They said, “Hey, look, there’s smog.” And they warned that if the smog increased to a certain point it would be dangerous. But, when they got past that point, they changed the danger level. And the smog is still getting worse. And now they tell us that all the rivers are polluted. In other words, it’s not that they just can’t meet the problem that exists. Things are getting worse. Third WorldBut, it is the underdeveloped world – in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Arab countries – where the contradictions of this system are the most clear. To really understand what this system means for Third World people, consider this one fact: When a worker finishes a full day in the colonial world, he produces as much as an average American worker does in 22 minutes. There is no way of solving the tremendous problems, the hunger and the poverty, that exist in the Third World unless that figure is raised. In order to raise this figure, you have to industrialize, you have to mechanize, you have to invest. Well, what happens is that instead of getting help from the industrialized sections of the world, instead of getting capital, Third World countries are drained of their wealth by the imperialist countries. More important, the Third World countries are blocked from industrializing simply because the advanced capitalist countries will not permit the competition which would result from it. In fact, in terms of the effect such exploitation is having on the world, in terms of people actually dying, starving and suffering, and their whole lives being destroyed by poverty, this is one of capitalism’s greatest crimes. Capitalism doesn’t just have general long-range problems like the ones I’ve just mentioned. It has other contradictions – big crises, like depressions and wars. And specifically in this period, when the colonial world is trying to break out of capitalism, the wars are directed against the colonial world. How do we go about changing this situation? How do we make it so that we can really fulfill our potential as human beings? First, it is necessary to realize that in the United States we have a ruling class. And it’s very important that everyone should get to know and recognize their ruling class. The ruling class in the United States is very small. In fact, I think, proportionately, it is the smallest ruling class in the history of any society. Even defined broadly, there are only about 30,000 of them. There are a lot of people who think they belong to the ruling class, but only about 30,000 who have the real power. Now, there are certain ways you can go about finding out just who these people are. One example is when you pick up your local paper and look at the society page. You see their children. The newspapers go to their parties and take pictures of the sons and daughters of the ruling class. In some cities, the people in the ruling class register themselves. Of course, some ruling class people don’t make the register, and there are some people who slip in who aren’t from the ruling class. But basically the social registers are a good indication of who these people are. In addition you can read many books put out on this question. Books like “The Rich and the Super-Rich.” They spell it out. How It’s DoneNow, how does the ruling class do it? Here, you’ve got some 30,000 people running a society of over 200 million and most of the people in the society don’t even know it. In the past, the ruling classes were proud of their role. They would walk around with feathers in their hats, or big robes and things, and when they went down the street, people would say, “Hey, there goes one of our ruling class.” Nowadays, they don’t do that. Now, they can slip on the campus where you are, and somebody in the ruling class could walk right by, and you wouldn’t even know it. They dress just like you. They’re incognito. Rockefeller would never come to your campus and say, “Hi, how’re you doing? Are you studying hard, getting your degrees so that you can come work for me and make me richer?” No, they don’t do that. They go around saying that there aren’t any classes in America, that everybody’s middle-class, only that some are a little more middle-class than others. In other words, they are ashamed of their existence. They have to hide it. And there are good reasons for that. One of their problems, of course, is that they’re so small. Why, there are more than 30,000 people on just one or two campuses. Now, how do they maintain their rule? To find this out you can try an experiment. Get all dressed up, put on a jacket and tie, and walk into some corporation and say, “Hello, I’m a sociologist, I’m here to do a study. Could I just walk around and talk to people?” And then you walk up to somebody and say, “Who’s your supervisor?” And he’ll point to someplace, and you find someone with a little name plate, and it’s a supervisor. And you ask him, “Who’s your supervisor?” And he’ll point to a different place, and you walk in and there’ll be a run. And you say to him, “Who’s your supervisor?” And he’ll point to a different floor, and you’ll find it get harder to get in the doors. There’s more and more secretaries, and phones, and the rugs get thicker and thicker. Eventually you have to make appointments. And then you hit the sound barrier. Here is where you switch from the people who carry our decisions to people who make the decisions. And that’s you local ruling class. The StructureBy the way, if you test out any institution in our society, you’ll find they are structured in the same way. A pyramid from the top going down. That’s the way all institutions are structured in this democratic country. This goes from government, for the political parties, the Army, the churches, the universities, for every basic institution. And when you get to the very top of these structures, to the most powerful people, you will invariably find people who own big property. Now, how do they keep the structure going? It’s a very subtle thing. In the United States, we have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and other democratic rights. So, say you go to your job on day and test it. Wear a big button that says, “Vote Socialist.” And watch how fast you get promoted. Watch how you are treated. Formally you have the right to have any political view you want. But, the truth is that in all these institutions there is a very worked out, institutionalized way of going up. And on the way up, you sell your individuality, you commit yourself to the values of the system. And you learn very fast that in return for full commitment of the system – for personal discipline, for showing up every morning wearing the right clothes, keeping your hair short, and the rest – in return, you get privileges. That is what holds the society together. When was the last time you heard someone say, “Capitalism’s a great society”? When did you hear anyone say, “Just think what our 30,000 ruling class has done for us. We should give them our full support.” They never say that. They don’t try to build up an ideological support for capitalism in the sense of telling you the full truth. All the institutions under capitalism are ideological institutions in the sense that all of them maintain and demand support for the system. So it should be no surprise to you that the higher you go in a corporation, the higher you go in the university structure, the higher you go in the Army, the people get more and more reactionary. They get more and more consciously pro the system; they are more and more for whatever crimes the system has to commit. They simply wouldn’t be there if they weren’t. This is why you can never capture the existing apparatus and use it for making a basic change. Workers’ PowerToday the smallness of the ruling class means that other classes have more power in comparison. We have a working-class army, for example, that has a great deal of actual and potential power. Take the basic production of goods and services. Have you ever thought what a general strike would be like in New York City? Workers can take over this city in a matter of hours. Because workers run everything – the subways, the trucks that bring food, gas, light, heat – everything. So you have to ask yourself, why is this power never realized politically? Why don’t they just kick the 30,000 out? The reason is simple. The mass of people are under illusions. Now let me repeat this because the whole strategy of the making a revolution in the U.S. is crucially dependent on understanding this. The 30,000 can rule only through maintaining illusions. You see, if tomorrow, President Nixon called a press conference and said, “Okay, I’m going to let you in on it; there’s 30,000 of us who are running this country. We’re canceling all elections. We’re canceling freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and so on. So go back to work, back to the campus – and if there is any disturbance we’ll throw you all into concentration camps.” How long do you think the ruling class would stay in power? They couldn’t do it. Their power is already limited by a certain consciousness that exists in the mass of people. Their power is limited by the fact that the mass of the people believe in free speech, in free assembly and in democracy. And this, by the way, is the thing that is least understood by the student movement. Many students believe that the ruling class has unlimited power. They think fascism and concentration camps are around the corner. Of course, we cannot be naïve about the ruling class. They will suppress opposition to them insofar as they can get away with it. And they will use the most brutal means available if it suits their needs. But they will try to keep the repression in the bounds of what they can get away with without waking up the mass of people, without destroying the illusions. Because, if the mass begins to wake up, that’s a big danger. Two-SidedThere are two sides to democracy in this country, and if you don’t understand both sides, you go wrong. One side is that it’s phony. There is no real democracy in the sense that we don’t run this country. The elections are totally phony. The ruling class simply gets up and picks two people, or three, and they say, “Okay, everybody, we’re having elections. Now you can vote for Humphrey, or for Wallace, or for Nixon.” Then they have their candidates have a debate. But the debate isn’t entirely phony. The debate often represents a real living struggle between different positions within the ruling class. The ruling class resolves many of the smaller tactical differences they have among themselves through means of elections. Obviously, such elections do not in any way mean that the people have a voice in ruling this country. At the same time, the masses of people believe in democracy. And this belief in democracy is something that actually weakens the rulers. And it is something that gives us real power. There is a power relationship between the masses and the ruling class based on the potential power of the working class. Because of this power relationship, you can do many things. It gives us what we call free speech. It gives us free assembly. It gives us the right to organize the YSA legally. Take for example the underground press. The underground press isn’t really underground. These papers are published legally even though they attack the system. They don’t suppress the newspapers because they know that the minute they start suppressing papers, it’s going to wake people up and bring a reaction. The only hope the ruling class has is if it can isolate the revolutionaries completely from the rest of the people. That is why the number-one task of all revolutionaries is to know how to reach the people. This is one of the biggest problems existing in the student movement at this point. The average student radical does not identify with the American people. In fact, he’s hostile to them. He says, “The American people, ugh, they’re against the Vietnamese, they’re racists, they’re this and that.” But you know something? That hate for the American people was taught to the student before he became a radical. Middle-class PrejudiceWhen you go to school, the whole concept you are taught is that anyone that works with his hands is below you. The average Joe Shmoe is a stupid fool. And they justify the fact that some people have more privileges by saying it’s because they’re more qualified. Everything you learn in the university is calculated to give you that superiority feeling. And when you become a radical, you just turn around and invert it in a way. You keep the same prejudice in your mind and you continue to say, “How stupid the average American worker is.” He’s no stupider than you were before you became a radical. Black people used to imitate white people, right? But, with the radicalization, one of the first things that started happening was that Black people stopped imitating the people who oppressed them. It’s the same thing with white workers. The thing that white workers do today is they imitate the people they regard as above them. They try to be like them. They vote for their parties. They support their ideas. But when they wake up this is one of the first things that will change. Now let me explain something about mass awakening. There’s no way that we radicals can by ourselves wake up the American people. Just forget about that. There is no special leaflet that we could write so articulately and carefully that when you hand it to a worker, he will pick it up and say, “That’s it – I’m with you.” If that were how we could do it, we’d have done it a long time ago. There is only one way it will happen. Capitalism does it for us. The system creates the situation in which people wake up. Let me give you a few examples. Think about why it is that Black people are moving today. Weren’t they Black in 1920? Weren’t they actually worse off, if you want to look at objective conditions, in 1910, 1920 and 1930? Role of AfricaYou know that at the beginning of the century, and after that, one of the biggest put-downs they had for Black people was to call them Africans. Then came the revolutions in Africa and other part of the Third World. And Black people started identifying with Africa, saying, “We’re all Africans.” And the ruling class began to say, “No, you’re Americans.” At the same time more and more Black people were moving to the cities because of the industrialization of the South. And this concentration of Black people living in the cities – this begins to give them a sense of power and is one of the reasons you have the rise of Black nationalism today. That is another example of how capitalism creates the basis for radicalization. I’ll give you one other example. For those people who were unemployed in the 1930s during the depression, their goal in life was to have a job, to have some stability. If you took a man who was unemployed or who had a lousy job and you gave him a job with fairly good pay, with the perspective of getting continuous increases – that to him was Nirvana. From what he had experienced in life, that was happiness. But then what happened? His kids grew up. And many of them didn’t have the constant image of the unemployed. There would always be food on the table. They could look forward to going to college. And all of a sudden the perspective of doing what their parents did, getting a job, working 40 hours a week, wasn’t so inviting. Consciousness is related to what you have lived. And what you expect. Anybody would have told you that the many years of prosperity would have completely conservatized the youth. But just the opposite has happened. They grew up totally dissatisfied, to the point that it’s becoming a mass rebellion of youth. The rebellion takes place on all levels. For instance, they start growing their hair long, just because it’s suppose to be short. They’re trying to do everything that they’re no suppose to do, because what they’re expressing, unconsciously, is that they’re totally aware that there’s potential to have an entirely different kind of life. They become aware of it by the very fact of how they live their first 21 years. They go to the university with other young people. And they want to do something creative. They want to be free. And they realize this is possible. They don’t want to just go to work for Standard Oil, which for their parents was a great thing. Radicalizing ProcessSo, all of a sudden, you have an increase in consciousness, an awareness about the problems of society, created by the capitalists. And this awareness can become much more intensified if you have a crisis – if you have a major war, or a downturn in the economic situation. Right now we have opposition, we have a radicalization, but even this is nothing compared to what can develop in the future. Now you can have all this spontaneous radicalization, you can even have uprisings of sorts, but that will never result in a change of the system, unless it’s organized, unless there is a concept of how to struggle. Because, the masses of people, when they first radicalize, they don’t understand the general problems. They don’t understand how to change society. Very few individuals come to this consciousness completely on their own. Think about the ideas – some of them very complex ideas – which have been a by-product of the accumulation of thought and experience over the long history of revolutionary struggle. It’s this thought, this experience which is embodied in what we call the vanguard – organizations like the Young Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Workers Party (today Youth for Socialist Action and Socialist Action). Now, the ruling class has also had experiences, from which they have gained knowledge. They’ve been running the United States without even any major political opposition for over 70 years now. They know how, when an opposition develops, to try to repress its vanguard, to knock it down, while at the same time how to maneuver and absorb it and buy it off. Eugene McCarthy’s campaign was an excellent example of this. Without a conscious vanguard with a revolutionary perspective it is hard to deal effectively with these ruling-class maneuvers. It is difficult to do the right thing. An example of this was the attitude of the early student antiwar movement toward the GIs. When the antiwar movement first began, the students’ immediate reaction was to hate GIs, to think of them as killers. I remember in Berkeley they even put up a picture of a GI portraying him as being the same thing as a cop. Saw AheadAt the same time, the YSA opposed this. We could predict, because of the mass opposition to the war and the fact that young people in general were radicalizing, that the GIs would radicalize. So way ahead, before signs of the GI radicalization could be seen concretely, we urged the antiwar movement to go out and leaflet GIs, and to begin to relate to them. And that’s what Marxism is all about. That’s what revolutionary politics is all about. It’s what has been learned from 100 years of struggle against the system. During this time there have been plenty of examples of how armies radicalize, and under what conditions they radicalize. There is something else the YSA sees, which we have learned from experiences in struggle. And that is that you mustn’t be sectarian. You should try to get everybody who is against the war to work together. The YSA understands that the best way to end this war, and to weaken the ruling class, is to get massive consciousness against the war – and to break the concept that the people against the war are a minority. And we know from experience that you have to use the most carefully though-out actions in order to produce that result. And in many cases, such actions are the so-called stupid, peaceful, mass antiwar demonstrations that some people are sick of – and of which we’ve now had eleven. And after each one of these mass demonstrations the YSA has said, “Okay, let’s do it again now.” And the SDS leaders say, “Are you guys crazy? What do you want to do that again for?” They look at it subjectively. They are tired of demonstrations themselves and they forget about the impact which the demonstrations have on the GIs, on the average person. They forget that the demonstrations are what helped the students to radicalize in the first place. Now, we’ve got a double problem in the antiwar movement and in the radical movement in general, and both sides of this double problem are closely interrelated. One is that some people think they are going to solve the problems of society by supporting some liberal. Let me explain what a liberal is. A liberal is someone who doesn’t like what capitalism does, but likes capitalism. They try to solve the problems created by the system by supporting the system. Now, many students do that too. When they supported McCarthy they did that. What they were looking for was a shortcut. They were trying to change the system from within. They hoped a McCarthy victory would be a substitute for building an independent political movement of the working people, the Black people and the students on a mass level, independently and against the ruling class. On the other side you have the ultraleftists who do the exact same thing – try to bypass building a mass movement. In California we have had a bad rash: people walking around saying, “Everybody get guns.” And there is a lot of applauding about guns at rallies. And then there are those who believe in confrontation as the only method of struggle. By this I mean that the success of an action for them is not measured by how many people are influenced and won over. Their criterion is “We’ve got to fight the police in the street. Otherwise we aren’t revolutionary.” What they are looking for is a shortcut. Some are naïve about what the cops can and will do to them. They think if the present vanguard arms itself and takes on the power structure, then they can change society. But they’re not going to change it by themselves. You can’t change it without the American people. And you certainly can’t change it against them. What is happening is that the ultraleftists are merely expressing frustration. Just like those who supported McCarthy, they don’t have the patience and the understanding of the need to mobilize the people, to win them over, to involve them in the struggle through mass movements. This is a working-class country. Black people in their great majority are working class. And there are the other oppressed nationalities – Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, etc. What you have is an overwhelming mass of people who have objectively no interest in this system. They have to be won over, and our whole strategy, everything we do, has got to be directed at winning them. French ExampleNow, how exactly can the American revolution come about? What kind of movements and strategy will allow us to take power? To make this clear, let me tell you what happened in France in May – June of 1968. I said that you need two things to make a revolution – a vanguard and an objective situation in which there is a crisis and a mass radicalization. Well, in France you had that objective situation – but you had no revolutionary vanguard. Let me show you how, if there had been a strong vanguard, revolutionaries in France would have led a struggle to take power from the ruling class: In France you had 10 million workers on strike. You had another two million farmers supporting them. Plus the 600,000 students. Now, since the total population of the country is 50 million, this means that an overwhelming majority of families had at least one if not two people involved in the strike. It was clear that the majority of the people in France were out on strike, making certain demands. You had a majority. There was no need to negotiate with anyone. What would a Marxist vanguard do in such a situation? First of all, we would fight for the formation of a strike council of the whole country which would simply say, “Well, it’s clear we have a majority, so we are going to have free elections to decide all the questions under demand here. And these elections are going to be run by the strike council because the government has shown itself to be undemocratic.” Remember, at the time of the crisis, de Gaulle (the president of France –YSA) had no real power, except in the sense that there was a vacuum which he filled. Do you know that when de Gaulle wanted to hold a referendum during the strike, it was so unpopular that he couldn’t get any workers in all of France to print the ballots? He had to go to Belgium, to ask the Belgian workers to print the ballots, and they refused too! He had no strength. One might ask, what about the army? But he had no army with him. Maybe the officers, but the soldiers – who were the soldiers of France? They were the sons and brothers of the strikers. The first thing a strike council would do would be to immediately hold elections in the army barracks for new officers, and any officers that didn’t accept this would be thrown out. And then you would go to the barracks and ask the soldiers to share their guns. The guns would be used to help form militias of the people. Then you would dissolve the police force and have the workers out on the streets patrolling. That could have been done in a number of days under the conditions that existed in France. Just to start with, you had hundreds of thousands of students who would have been immediately willing to participate in the militias and to arm themselves. Then elections would be held in the factories, and other institutions, and delegates representing the rank-and-file workers in the factories, the students, the soldiers in the army and people in all the various institutions would come together in a central council. And you would put on the floor of this body, which would be the most democratically chosen body in the history of the country, the motion that all industries are nationalized. We would simply pass that, along with other programs which would meet the people’s needs. When you think about it, every step I’ve outlined, every demand, is based on democratic ideas. The word “socialist” hasn’t even been used. Because what socialism means is not simply that socialists come to power, but that a class – the masses of the working people – come to power. That could have happened in France. The objective conditions were there, the radicalization among the masses. What was missing? There was no sufficiently strong Marxist vanguard. The working class in France was led by a party which supports capitalism, called the Communist Party. So the big problem in France, in order to make a revolution, is to depose the Communist Party from the leadership of the working class. In the United States, things are going to happen in a similar way to what happened in France. Not the same, but similar. Look what’s happening on campus – it’s spontaneous; on campus after campus you see radical actions. The same thing is going to take place in the working class. It is already happening with the masses of Black people. As these movements develop, the vanguard at first is small, and can play only a limited role. But, out of these actions come young people who begin to understand that you need to think out the whole question. They learn from experience. Maybe they get busted and they start thinking how to be effective. And someone sits down with them and explains how you make a revolution, how you form a vanguard and slowly build up and participate in mass struggles, how you get an interrelationship between the mass movements and the vanguard, and how you reach a situation where a crisis will develop and the vanguard will be able to lead the masses to take power. The key to victory is moving the masses. Any concept, any struggle that eliminates this will only end in disaster. Unfortunately, the ultraleft idea that you can go around the masses, or make the revolution without them, is one that is creeping into the thinking of many students and young people today. But there ill be a reaction to this. One of the troubles with ultraleftism is, of course, that when people react against it, they sometimes react against militancy in general, and flip over to become opportunists. In fact, you’re going to see people who were opportunists yesterday going over to being ultraleft today, and the ultralefts of today flipping over to become opportunists. Because all of them are looking for the same thing – a shortcut. And there is no shortcut to change the system. It takes a long time. You have to have a perspective of fighting for 10, 20 or even more years. Just like the Vietnamese say they will fight 10, 20, or 40 years – whatever is necessary. You can’t walk into the YSA and say, “I want a guarantee that the revolution will happen in five years because after that I have other plans.” The revolution doesn’t work that way. So, to end, I want to say this. The ruling class is never going to solve its problems through the capitalist system. Therefore, the objective conditions for revolution are going to rise up over and over again. We don’t create these conditions, but there is one thing we can do. That is, we can create the subjective factor – the vanguard. By entering the YSA, by building the revolutionary party, by understanding and participating in the revolutionary process, we can make victory possible. Are we going to be able to do it? Other generations have failed to do it. Are we going to be able to build a revolutionary socialist vanguard that can lead a mass movement to overthrow the system? That’s the challenge to this young generation. And the answer of the YSA is yes, we’re going to do it.