Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Ideology, Organization and the Mass Struggle--A Presentation by Abayomi Azikiwe at the Left Forum

Ideology, Organization and the Mass Struggle

Lessons from the Moratorium NOW! Coalition, 2008-2013

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Note: The following paper was presented at the Left Forum on June 8, 2013 on a panel dealing with various mass struggles in the United States. The Left Forum was held at Pace University in New York City.
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Capitalism inside the United States is in terminal crisis. Since 2007, the banks and corporations have shed millions of jobs, taken trillions of dollars in bailouts from the federal government and the Federal Reserve and seized the homes of millions of people throughout the country.

In the city of Detroit, which was the most industrialized metropolitan area in the country, has been under a process of capitalist restructuring since late 1950s accelerating in successive waves during the mid-1970s, the mid-1980s and of course reached unprecedented levels over the last six years.

This restructuring was designed to address inherent problems within the capitalist mode of production and relations of production. The trade union movement, which in many ways through its leadership, had abdicated to the anti-communism and racism of the Post-World War II period, was not shielded from the attacks that began to occur during the 1980s when hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs were eliminated in the auto industry.

In providing higher salaries and living standards for the white working class during the post-World War II period, the ruling class through the state was attempting to win the allegiance of the white population in order to intensify the repression and exploitation of African American workers but also the proletariat in general. Both internationally and domestically, the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America were identified as the principal enemy of the capitalist system in the U.S. through their purported susceptibility to national liberation struggles and communism.

Nonetheless, this strategy opened the way ideologically for placing anti-capitalist perspectives on the defensive within the mass media, the education system and the political culture. Yet it was the advent of the mass Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s combined with the rise of the national liberation movements and socialism internationally that created broader avenues for democratic expression within the U.S.

Observing and assessing the changing racial character of the rural and urban working class and the militant upsurges of the post-World War II period, the ruling class, in order to preserve and enhance its rate of profitability, began to relocate its plants into non-unionized areas of the South and outside the U.S. The working class and national movements inside the U.S. were not prepared for this major shift. What has happened over the last three decades is the greater impoverishment of the nationally oppressed and the working class as a whole.

The Struggle for a Moratorium of Foreclosures, Evictions, Utility Shut-offs and Debt-Service

In 2006-7, our mass work in Michigan was informed through direct observation and experience that a major crisis had developed in the housing industry. The housing crisis was an outgrowth of the loss of jobs and income and the role of the banks utilizing those assets ostensibly owned by working people to further their exploitation and impoverishment.

We began our struggle against predatory lending and home seizures through the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) which was formed in 2002 on the eve of the imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq. Our principal slogan was “Money for Our Cities, Not for War!” This slogan highlighted the escalating contradiction under capitalism where the living standards of the people, particularly the nationally oppressed, were worsening while expenditures and the costs of imperialist war were escalating.

MECAWI developed a program based upon developments at the height of the Great Depression during the 1930s when a movement of workers, the unemployed and African Americans fought against mass evictions, lay-offs, political repression and racism. We drafted leaflets calling for a moratorium, an immediate halt, to all foreclosures and evictions in the state of Michigan pending the outcome of the economic downturn which had hit the state first and with a vengeance.

This demand struck directly at the property rights under capitalism of the banks and corporations to seize the homes of working people based upon the interest of the ruling class, the real owners of capital. Our first successful project took place in late 2007 when we mounted a community campaign on the northwest side that saved an African American woman activist’s home from seizure by HUD and the banks.

In 2007 and 2008 we took people to the State Capitol in Lansing for the governor’s “state of the state” address to call for the declaration of an economic state of emergency and the imposition of a moratorium on home seizures. This movement grew during 2008, a national election year, when the economic crisis deepened.

In the Spring of 2008, State Senator Hansen Clarke recognizing the work that we were doing, in consultation with MECAWI, drafted a bill which would place a two-year moratorium on home foreclosures. At this point through MECAWI, we formed a new and broader alliance called the Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures and Evictions. Later during 2009 we added utility shut-offs to the focus of Moratorium NOW! Coalition since direct observations and involvement viewed massive utility shut-offs as a form of eviction through illegal lockouts from apartments and homes.

Of course through mass action which included marches at the leading Detroit and Michigan outlets of the largest banks in the country, home defenses, the consistent propaganda offenses against the failure of the state government to address the housing crisis and pointing to the central role of the financial institutions in the burgeoning economic crisis, we were able to influence the political atmosphere locally, statewide and nationally.

By the Fall of 2008, the crisis would reach a boiling point when the Congress was compelled to provide over $700 billion to bailout the banks, insurance companies and the auto industry. Obama’s election and the so-called stimulus package of 2009 could not conceal the worsening situation inside the U.S.

The crisis of capitalism is not only confined to the U.S. it is in fact a worldwide crisis. In Western Europe massive unemployment, deepening poverty and the imposition of austerity illustrates that the crisis is not episodic but chronically systematic. The capitalists, both politically and ideologically, have no ideas beyond the enactment of draconian cuts in employment, social programs, public services, pensions and education combined with state repression.

Since 2011, the housing crisis has further crippled the cities’ capacity to maintain services. The banks are also at the root of the crisis of the cities because some of the same financial instruments that were used to destroy the housing sector and enrich the ruling class were utilized to strangle the urban areas in municipal debt.

In 2012 it was revealed that the municipal bond market was a $3.7 trillion industry. In Detroit and throughout the state of Michigan, municipalities are being placed under emergency management in order to guarantee the payment of fraudulent loans to the banks.

The municipal debt crisis has been best exemplified in Stockton and San Bernardino, California, Jefferson County, Alabama, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Providence, Rhode Islands, Chicago, Illinois and a host of other cities and towns across the U.S. The banks are saying that they should be paid first even if there are no resources left to maintain civil servants, municipal services, public pensions, public transportation and public schools.

Consequently, the Moratorium NOW! Coalition’s focus has expanded to also include the demand for a halt to the payment of debt-service to the banks. In Detroit, the banks are saying that the majority African American city owes in excess of $16 billion to these same financial institutions that wrecked the municipality through capital flight, home foreclosures, evictions and utility shut-offs.

Undoubtedly, the struggle against emergency management, which strips all of the limited authority of municipal governing structures in the efforts to force total subservience to the banks, represents an assault on bourgeois democracy. Nonetheless, this process is clearly designed for the purpose of economic exploitation and political repression. The movement against emergency management is being forced to address the principal role of the financial institutions in the urban crisis.

Bourgeois Democracy and the Character of the Capitalist State

V.I. Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote during the early days of the first socialist transformation of a capitalist state that “The forms of domination of the state may vary: capital manifests its power in one way where one form exists, and in another way where another form exists—but essentially the power is in the hands of capital, whether there are voting qualifications or some other rights or not, or whether the republic is democratic one or not—in fact the more democratic it is the cruder and more cynical is the rule of capitalism. One of the most democratic republics in the world is the United States of America, yet nowhere (and those who were there after 1905 probably know it) is the power of capital, the power of a handful of billionaires over the whole of society, so crude and so openly corrupt as in America. Once capital exists, it dominates the whole of society, and no democratic republic, no franchise can alter the essence of the matter.” (The State, pp. 20-21)

Therefore, our overriding objective is the replacement of the capitalist system with socialism. However, strategic objectives must be reached through tactics which are aimed at the mass mobilization and organization of the workers and the oppressed. The capitalist system must be exposed at its root as being incapable of addressing and solving the problems of the workers and the oppressed.

Once the people realize that the system is not only in diametrical opposition to their class interests but also has no ability to address the central problems they face, we can then move towards revolutionary organization for the removal of the exploitative system and the replacement of capitalism with socialism, where the workers and the oppressed will own and control the means of production.

As revolutionaries we can work in mass coalitions and at the same time maintain our independence politically and organizationally. In Detroit we have done this through the housing struggle and the various campaigns against emergency management.

As Mao Tse-Tung wrote in 1938, “In short, we must not split the united front, but neither should we allow ourselves to be bound hand and foot, and hence the slogan of ‘everything through the united front’ should not be put forward… Our policy is one of independence and initiative within the united front, a policy both of unity and of independence.” (The Question of Independence and Initiative Within the United Front, pp. 4-5)

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