What are we facing?
The capitalist world is a chaotic mess. Crisis can strike at any moment in any part of the lives of the people, either on a personal or wide scale. The daily rituals of exploitation, the hollowing out of what it means to live, and the crumbling of whatever social fabric people used to cling to are all features of the economic, political, and moral crisis that is Capitalism. Under this system, the horror of everyday life screams endlessly in our faces, deafening us to our own lives, to our communities, and to the chaos of profit-driven society. People live like frogs in boiling water; we are dying slowly and are too exhausted, narcotized, unhealthy, at a loss, bitter, dumbfounded, and agonized to be aware of, care about, or put our anger to any use against the system that put us here.
But the very same class oppression that the majority experience also unites and ignites — blood sweat and tears that the great masses of humanity have shed create fertile grounds for revolution. The task before us as revolutionaries is to honor this sacrifice and make something grow.
The class oppression that the majority experience UNITES and IGNITES!
Globally, we see this as the battle between the imperialist countries and the oppressed countries. The United States in particular preys upon whole nations: whether through forced regime change to hollow out governments into political puppets, starvation via sanctions, or bombing-as-punishment for not satisfying the desires of American capitalists. As activists living in the US, within the belly of the beast that feeds on the world, we have a crucial task to support the masses of the oppressed countries in their righteous fight against US imperialism.
While the US is undeniably a powerful force in the world, we can see that it’s losing its strength — now is the best time for us to gain ours! The US can less and less rely on covert ways of imposing its will, so, like an animal backed into a corner, the US bares its teeth and claws, through troop deployments, assassinations, and invasions. Brutal as these methods are, they expose the evil that is imperialism and capitalism. The terror and anguish of the people is every day more ripe to turn into disciplined, revolutionary anger. This is the greatest weapon of world revolution, foolishly handed to us by our enemies.
Just as the world is divided into imperialist and oppressed nations, the US is internally divided into exploiting and exploited classes, a minority of bloodsuckers and a majority of the downtrodden and oppressed, cheated out of the political power to decide their own fate. In the main, there is the bourgeoisie (the ruling class) and the vast millions of whose time and energy is stolen through exploitation – the proletariat. But these are not the only classes: often called the ‘middle classes,’ the small or ‘petty’ bourgeoisie is made up of small business owners, professionals, academics, and other people who do work but not in the collective, waged sense that defines the proletariat. There is also an underclass called the lumpenproletariat of both exploited and exploiters operating in the informal economy like organized gangs, sex workers, and the homeless.
A change in these conditions cannot come except through a change in the attitudes of the working and oppressed masses towards revolution. We can categorize these attitudes as politically backwards, intermediate, or advanced.
- The backwards are loyal to the ruling class and its state, and often is made up of petty bourgeois individuals or the bourgeoisie itself, and even the most traitorous elements of the working class.
- The politically intermediate feel too defeated to act. This is where most people in the US find themselves. Capitalism in its soul-sucking, planet-killing entirety drains hope from many working people who see the present suffering of the world as inevitable and unchangeable. These defeatist ideas are neither strongly for or against revolution, so it must be our job as revolutionaries to sway them towards revolution.
- The last trend is advanced, the revolutionary trend of those who affiliate against the state, believe that the current capitalist system must be abolished, and are politically engaged. Those in revolutionary organizations like GDC, or who seek to join revolutionary organizations, are a part of this trend.
As a settler-colonial, slave-driving country, class in the US is fundamentally misunderstood without considering race. The ongoing centuries of genocide and the most extreme exploitation of Indigenous, Black, Chicano, and other oppressed peoples is tightly bound to our class structure, where the racially- oppressed make up a disproportionate amount of the working class and incarcerated.
Women also face the most backwards attacks so the ruling class can squeeze even more profit from this half of the population: daily disappearances, murder, and rape the bourgeois state will never meaningfully address, recent rollbacks of basic abortion rights, working a “double shift” where women do both wage labor at the workplace and domestic labor at home, even when their male family members could contribute. Attacks on queer and especially trans people run rampant with the barrage of legal and physical assaults growing by the day.
These conditions are not new, and the US has a long history of revolutionary struggle in periods of both high and low tide. The last high tide of struggle was in the 60s and 70s with the militant organizing of our revolutionary forebearers like the Black Panthers / Black Liberation Army, Young Lords, American Indian Movement, and many more. But the political shortcomings of these organizations, plus the mass incarceration of their activists and the unleashing of NGOs to tame revolutionary anger, all contributed to a falling tide. Today, because of our conditions, we are in a rising tide, with US violence facing fierce resistance both by the racially-oppressed masses from within and by the oppressed countries from outside. We must seize this moment to nurture the rising tide into fullblown revolution!
We feel these global and national escalations in Michigan too. In Detroit, hundreds of African, Latino, and Indigenous masses have been abducted by ICE and detained at the Baldwin GEO Group torture camp or in MDOC’s moldy prisons.
Change in conditions can only come through a change in the attitudes of the working and oppressed masses towards REVOLUTION.
This administration has already deported around 60% of kidnapped immigrants from Michigan. Violent sweeps of homeless encampments in Washtenaw county and Lansing — alongside city/state sanctioned evictions and murders of tenants in Detroit and Wayne — show the scheming between landlords, city officials, police, and predatory businesses in disappearing the poor. Continued and increasing police murders of Black people in cities like Wayne and Detroit, parallel to the violent repression of anti-zionist protesters and militants in cities like Ann Arbor, draw a clear line between the interests of the state (occupation and control) and the poor (survival and overthrow).
As the people survive more frequent environmental disasters in Detroit, displacement by gentrification and rising rent, and endless other examples of surging class oppression, the ruling class pushes NGOs in Michigan like elsewhere to capture the rising anger of the masses. But the Non-profit Industrial Complex is increasingly failing; on the one hand, by being cut off from capitalist funding, but also in their cowardice to engage in anything resembling struggle. Any real power is lost on these NGOs, and the struggle for liberation must be led by the people!
In GDC we assess that the conditions for revolution are ripe; it’s up to us as revolutionaries to learn from past lessons, to build lasting infrastructure, and above all integrate with the masses and raise up mass leadership because the masses make history!
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