USA, February 11 — “I had to leave one fascist country as a child,” sputtered a co-worker from Argentina, almost too angry to talk. “Now do I have to leave another?”
Emotions ran high as the US Senate voted – as expected – to acquit Trump of his impeachment charges. Trump takes his acquittal as license to become more openly dictatorial.
“Is democracy dead or dying?” many ask. That’s the wrong question.
Instead ask: “How can we the masses liberate ourselves? How can we organize ourselves to build and run a world where everyone’s needs are met?” The answer isn’t “democracy.” It’s “communism.”
Democracy in Action: Capitalist Dictatorship
Democracy is supposedly “rule by the people.” But who is ruling and who is being ruled?
In this capitalist world, capitalists rule. Some politicians are themselves capitalists like Trump and Bloomberg. Others become capitalists while in office, like Obama and Mitch McConnell. Most rely on capitalist backers.
Always they represent the tiny class that owns and profits from almost all the means of production. Their laws are backed by armed force. They exercise power over the industrial working class in the US and elsewhere in the world and over the broader masses of people.
US capitalism’s famous democracy tells us that “your vote is your voice.” We’re told: Vote, then shut up and work. Especially shut up at work. This is not “rule by the people.” It is capitalist dictatorship.
The Trump administration recently suggested requiring “classical” (Greek-Roman) architecture for new federal buildings. This resembles the Nazi revolt against “modernism.” But ancient Greece was the birthplace of democracy — and a society built on slave labor. The same with Rome: even its most radical leaders limited voting rights to free men.
Southern plantation architecture honored the Greek combination of democracy and slavery. That included mansions of “founding fathers” Washington, Jefferson and others. Democracy today is a political form by which capitalists maintain their rule over us, their wage slaves. It’s the flip side of fascism, not it’s opposite.
Communist Revolution, Not Democracy, Will Defeat Fascism
US democracy has always included aspects of fascism, even under Democratic presidents. Exclusion, internment and deportation of immigrant workers. Violent racist terror against black workers during and after slavery, up to the present. Suppression of communists and other anti-capitalist fighters. An increasingly corporate state. Ever-expanding executive powers.
Democracy can’t defeat fascism because both have the same root: capitalism.
The cry “Any blue [Democrat] will do” is an attempt to bully the many alienated workers and youth who hate Trump into voting against their interests. Choosing a Democrat, like choosing a Republican, is voting for exploitation and war and the fascist blue-shirts called cops. Look at the vicious racist record of Democratic candidate Bloomberg!
What About Bernie?
Trump calls Sanders a “communist.” Newsweek magazine helpfully explains why he’s not: Communism would have “no private property, and no class distinctions.” In contrast, socialism “does not reject markets or property or profit but seeks to regulate these for purposes of social justice.” This is Sanders’ position, more accurately called “social democracy.”
Socialism, historically, meant government ownership of the means of production. Sanders won’t touch that! Socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere maintained markets, class distinctions, the wage system and even profit. Nowhere did it lead to communism. On the contrary, it inevitably led back to undisguised capitalism.
Venezuela’s “21st century socialism” did the same. Maduro just surrendered control of Venezuela’s crucial oil industry to imperialist companies.
Sanders’ “revolution” is reform. His social-democratic campaign builds anti-communism. He is no real threat to the capitalist class.
Mobilizing for Communism Can Defeat Fascism and Liberate the Masses
So how can the masses liberate ourselves? How can we organize ourselves to build and run a world where everyone’s needs are met?
We need bullets, not ballots. Only armed insurrection and communist revolution – the dictatorship of the working masses over the capitalists—can destroy the power of the bosses who exploit and rule over us today.
To prepare for that fight we need to mobilize masses for communism now.
The communist goal of a world without private property or class distinctions must fire up the imagination of workers and youth everywhere. A world where cooperation and sharing replace bosses and markets.
Such a world will end the material basis of racism, sexism, xenophobia and more. It will erase all borders and barriers that divide us. In a communist world, the masses will make all decisions that affect us: from our workplaces to our neighborhoods to our planet.
That requires organization. By joining and building the International Communist Workers’ Party today, you are helping to create the nucleus of that organization. Every copy of Red Flag that you distribute, every conversation you have about communism, every communist action you take makes far more of a difference than any vote you will ever cast.