Tyranny or Revolution

We face a choice. Tyranny or revolution.

Tyranny or Revolution - by Mr. Fish

MEXICO CITY — There are two ways to confront global capitalism. There are mass movements, especially strikes, which disrupt commerce and government to force the ruling class to create systems of justice and equality — albeit ones where capitalists retain significant power.

The National Coordinator of Education Workers in Mexico (CNTE) — a grassroots union created in 1979 by dissident teachers — is currently attempting this in Mexico. It announced that if its demands for salary increases and job security are not met it will occupy public spaces and shut down the World Cup soccer matches scheduled to take place later this month in Mexico City.

When the teachers went on strike in the Mexican city of Oaxaca in 2006, following the incarceration and disappearances of union leaders, police fired on the protesters. The community rose up and drove the police out of the city. Oaxaca established an autonomous anarchist commune for several months. Although the commune was ultimately crushed by the Mexican government, the uprising spawned popular assemblies, independent media and empowered indigenous communities.

The second way to destroy capitalism is through the nationalization of industries and banks and the seizure of capitalist assets, although this can give rise to an equally pernicious form of state capitalism. This radical route entails, as in the Russian or Cuban revolutions, violence. Capitalists do not part with their monopolies on wealth and power peacefully. They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.

Accommodating capitalists and their institutions, even with high taxation, regulation, strong labor laws and a prohibition of monopolies, means living amid a hostile force. It is a matter of time before this hostile force organizes to dismantle the social democratic state as happened in Sweden, Britain and Salvador Allende’s Chile.

Liberalism, which Rosa Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name — “opportunism” — is an integral component of capitalism. Liberalism ameliorates capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms blunt resistance, but later, when things grow quiet, are revoked. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study of Luxemburg’s observation.

Luxemburg also knew that socialism and imperialism were incompatible. Imperialism, which empowers a war machine designed to enrich arms merchants and global capitalists, is accompanied by a poisonous ideology — what social critic Dwight Macdonald in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” calls the “psychosis of permanent war” — which makes socialism impossible.

The psychosis of permanent war results, as it has in the U.S., in the curtailing of civil liberties and punishing economic austerity. Dissent is equated with treason. State power serves the dictates of empire rather than democracy, which devolves into farce, or in our case, a tawdry reality show.

The rollback of the New Deal, the closest we came to a social democracy, began in the mid-1940s. Cold War anti-communism and corporate opposition converged to make war on organized labor and the New Deal left. This assault culminated in the Second Red Scare.

In 1947, President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835 launched loyalty investigations that purged the left, including public-sector workers and union allies. That same year, the Taft–Hartley Act directly targeted organized labor by restricting strikes, secondary boycotts and union security agreements and by requiring union officers to sign anti-communist affidavits.

The left fell victim to what the historian Ellen Schrecker, in “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America,” calls “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.”

“In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture,” Schrecker writes.

This crusade, she goes on, “used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.”

The witch hunts silenced communists, socialists, anarchists, pacifists and all those who denounced the abuses of empire and capitalism. The “anti-red” actions dealt devastating blows to the political health of the country. The radicals spoke the language of class war. They understood that Wall Street and the billionaire class are the enemy. They offered a broad social vision that allowed even the non-communist left to make sense of the predatory nature of capitalism. But once the radicals were purged, once the liberal class took government-imposed loyalty oaths and collaborated in the witch hunts for phantom communist agents, we were robbed of the ability to make sense of our struggle. We lost our voice. We were integrated into the corporate structures we should have been dismantling.

The ruling class justifies its pillage with the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey points out, “had limited effectiveness as an engine for economic growth” but is successful as “a project to restore class dominance.” It transfers wealth upwards. It consolidates power in the hands of the billionaire class. It is an updated version of the divine right of kings.

Wages under neoliberalism stagnate. If the minimum wage kept pace with productivity, it would be at least $25 an hour.

Deindustrialization, turbocharged under Bill Clinton, sent industries overseas, where workers are paid slave wages and lack benefits. Some thirty million mass layoffs in the U.S. between 1996 and 2023, according to analysis by the Labor Institute, thrust the working class into economic misery. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair carried out the same assaults in Britain.

Ominously, accompanying this deterioration is the blocking of peaceful avenues for social change, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which effectively turned elections over to the billionaire class.

As social inequality has grown, so has state repression. We stand on the cusp of full-blown authoritarianism and fascism. If the Trump administration succeeds in rigging or invalidating the midterm elections, the last possible exit door within the political system will be slammed shut.

The evisceration of the rule of law at home is accompanied by the evisceration of the rule of law abroad. The U.S. Empire is a rogue state. It issues bellicose threats to all who defy it, braying like a wild animal. It carries out “preemptive” wars and imposes sanctions on nations that are defiant. It assassinates and kidnaps foreign leaders. It abducts foreign nationals and transports them to black sites where they are tortured and sometimes murdered. It uses its navy to seize merchant vessels and resell their cargo. It bombs nations in open violation of international law. It funds and arms Israel to carry out genocide. It ignores and humiliates its allies and alienates and enrages most of the global community.

This mounting oppression, advanced but not begun by Trump, means we face two stark choices. Tyranny or revolution.

I loathe violence, even when it is exercised in the service of what is seen as a just cause. No one escapes its poison. But it is the oppressor, not the oppressed, who determines the mechanisms of resistance.

The numerous revolutions and insurgencies I covered, including in El Salvador, Guatemala, Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine, saw nonviolent protests met with brutal state violence. Resistance movements had no option but to pick up arms.

The nonviolent revolutions I covered in Eastern and Central Europe succeeded not because they were nonviolent, but because the capitalist class benefited from them. The capitalists and oligarchs bought up state industries and assets, as they did after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at prices far below their actual value.

The global capitalists permitted the transition to power by the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa if the ANC abandoned its Freedom Charter, which called for the nationalization of state industries and land redistribution. South Africa today has the highest income inequality in the world.

Revolutions that enhance the wealth and power of the capitalist class thrive. Revolutions that do not see blood run in the streets.

We also face a dilemma earlier generations did not — the climate crisis.

The global ruling elites are determined to keep us chained to fossil fuels. They are determined to commodify and exploit the natural world, as well as human beings, to expand profit. They are determined to reconfigure our societies so workers are immiserated and shorn of all power while our masters live in unparalleled luxury and opulence.

The inevitable breakdown of the climate will make larger and larger zones, especially in the Global South, uninhabitable. The waves of climate refugees will become a flood. There will, in response, be no limit to the industrial violence used by the ruling global elites to protect their interests.

The genocide in Gaza is an unequivocal message sent from the industrialized nations of the north, which spent billions to sustain Israel’s mass slaughter, to a global population that subsists on a few dollars a day:

We don’t care about humanitarian law. We don’t care about human rights. Your lives mean nothing to us. We will use any tool, including genocide, to protect our monopoly on wealth and power.

What do we do? How do we resist? Can we halt this descent into madness and mass death?

I am not optimistic.

Those who live in the climate fortresses in the Global North have a material interest in this project, although we are all headed for extinction. Those in the Global North will, I fear, accept a species of totalitarian capitalism in exchange for a degree of security and stability, however temporary.

But this will not be true in the Global South where the ecological crisis and the rule of the global capitalist class pose an existential threat. The Global South will mount insurgencies and revolutions. It will replicate its rebellions of the past, some of which were successful, and some of which, including the insurgencies I covered in Guatemala, El Salvador and Algeria, were crushed.

Revolution, and the possibility of a world freed from the iron grip of global capitalism, will come from these acts of resistance. Let us hope they prevail.