THE IMPORTANCE OF REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IS MORE OBVIOUS NOW

In a period of obvious social crisis, like the present, the old ways of thinking and explanations for social reality begin to look like rubbish and are discarded. This is true for both the rulers and the ruled. Right now the ruling elites are telling fairy tales about how things are getting better. Soon they will be offering new explanations for widspread poverty and want. The revivification of white supremacy is part of that "new explanation" for the collapse of our beloved capitalist system. You see people trying to blame Jews for the economic collapse as an alternative to pointing out that the capitalist system is inherently unstable and prone to collapse. Then there are those that believe immigrants are the cause of capitalist oppression.
Yes the capitalists have lots of scapegoats for the failures of their economic monopolies. Of course it would help if everyone forgets the happy stories about American prosperity, and who knows how many millions will simply zone out and do that. Only some of them will have aching bellies and may do a little more thinking than if they were
overfed as in the past.

Of course if we remain passive, robot-like and obedient we will simply "forget" those lies we passionately believed in yesterday only to embrace the new lies of the oppressors and their system. Of course, lies are eagerly embraced by many but I hope that most of us will chose to see the truth, look at the facts and believe in those things rather than lies.

Mental slavery is what holds us back as oppressed women, oppressed workers and oppressed citizens of a bought and sold Republic. Lies and deceptions are a big part of Big Brother manipulations whether that be from the State or the Private Sector but the whole twisted way these lies and "facts" are organized by reactionary and conservative ideologies is even more deceptive and serves to make the oppressors look like the good guys. The oppressor is rarely the "good guy". "Good guy" is not the oppressor role. If the oppressor takes whatever resources he can from others and then does something "good" with that stolen wealth then we can see that all the good the oppressor did was based on the labor of others, and "the commons" available to all free citizens.

I think it is just about impossible to separate the oppressor from the web of social relations, the system of social relations that are oppressive. There is a personal and
social or collective aspect to this oppression just as it seems reasonable to think of liberty as the personal aspect of the more collective liberation.

Look at proposed Obamacare legislation, for example. It codifies a web of oppressive social relations where insurance companies, big pharma and other capitalist exploiters can do their best to deny health care to enhance profits and perks for managers and investors. In that sense Obama is an architect of oppression in the area of health and health care.

Consider another example. A person who wants slaves cannot do so without a social system that makes that possible.

So being a slave holder has a personal aspect. The slave holder is names Jefferson or Jackson and maybe he is a daddy of some of the slaves. So there are these personal aspects. Yet without the Constitution of the United States as immortalized by our founding fathers such slavery and the evil slaveholder would have been impossible, because that document makes slavery part of the nation as conceived by the United States Constitution. So it makes sense to look at the social and the personal, the collective and the individual aspect of things.

Some ideas about how liberty, liberation, oppression and all that work are also critical. That is why a liberation ideology or ideologies are helpful. They help us understand the basis of really existing oppressions and to design ways to achieve an end to these oppressions and the struggle for liberations instead.

A historical perspective is also helpful. How did we get where we are today? Where have we been? Where are we going? I think that we can put together a sort of robust historical materialism for the twenty first century but even if history has no built in progressivism we can hopefully work together to overcome oppressor ideologies and oppressive social relations, design liberated webs os social relations and implement them.

While no illuminating liberation framework should be neglected it seems to this observer that economic relations and the social relations that are based on these economic relations are now an arena of dramatic change. The long trend of proletarianization (for want of a better word) is accelerating with Depression 2.0 and the so-called "middle class" is disappearing at a remarkable rate. Can American workers remain enslaved by bigotry and religious nonsense? I hope not!


Class struggle and class oppression are the key link because class struggle interpenetrates so many aspects of social oppression and liberation.

Of course this observation is salient to this observer especially since the current economic crisis is hitting the United States in a way it has not for many decades. The long decline in the economic well being of the nation and its citizens has reached some sort of breaking point and the new United States will be more obviously a working class nation than most baby boomers could have ever imagined.

After all, my generation was led to believe and ended up believing in the vitality and prosperity of the United States
even if relative poverty still existed in the United States even in the most affluent of times. It was an article of faith that the United States was rich and that it was a middle class nation, now and forever, Amen.

Yet since Nixon went to China the clear trend has been to pit American workers against Chinese and other foreign workers being paid a pittance. Today millions and millions of more Americans are going to be paid nothing because after nearly forty years of bipartisan treason the middle class society of old is rapidly coming apart at the seams and a clearly working class nation is emerging.

Ironically socialism and communism makes more sense for those of us in the United States than ever. That doesn't mean following some rigid model that doesn't fit the remnants of our advanced industrial society. The relative success of Social Security and Medicare should not be understated. In some ways these programs may be models for the world. Clearly we need a just society where there is a place of dignity and useful activity for everyone and the very powerful and corrupt state capitalism we have now is just not filling the bill.

Of course there are not really any new ideas that I am hearing from our bought and sold rulers. It seems that free market fundamentalism remains in the saddle as Obama merrily struggles for the restoration of the status quo ante.

Of course, in the face of collapse and no really new ideas some suggest straight up hard fascism is America's future. I hope Gore Vidal is wrong and we don't end up with a straight up dictator but that is the trend with the militarization of domestic law enforcement and the introduction of the armed forces into domestic law enforcement as well. An American Mussolini or Franco is a potential solution for our fabulous capitalist ruling class. It is up to the rest of us to take away their jobs as rulers and to assume the position of sovereign citizens which they have stolen and reserved only for the themselves.

As for any American Mussolini we should oppose such fascists and defeat them stategically if we cannot prevent the rise of such a tyrant in the first place. Is it already happening? Look at the G2o meeting!