For millions of people around the world, the United States represents
the ultimate citadel of reaction: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush,
Hillary Clinton,
the CIA, imperialism, sanctions, war, drones, anti-communism,
discrimination, and exploitation. The American people are alleged to
be a homogeneous bloc
of ignorant, indifferent racists who blindly and enthusiastically back
the reactionary economic and military policies of their government.
Many people—even
on the left— imagine that the US is immune from class conflict, and
that life for the majority in the “belly of the beast” is prosperous
and peaceful.
However, while there may be an element of truth in some of this, the
reality is far more complex. The United States is in fact a society
riven with deep
class contradictions. It has an enormous and powerful working class
and an inspiring revolutionary past—and future.
[The below is an Introduction to the first Urdu edition of
Marxism and the USA.
The book has been translated by the Pakistani comrades of
The Struggle
and will be launched the coming congress of the The Struggle in March.]
occupy
It is in this context that the publication of the Urdu edition of Alan
Woods’ Marxism and the USA marks an important milestone for
revolutionary Marxists
in both Pakistan and the United States. For the first time since it
was originally published in 2005, Alan Woods’ whirlwind tour of the
true history of
class struggle in the USA is being made available to a Pakistani
audience. In this short work, Alan succeeds in dispelling many common
misconceptions about
the US and draws on the marvelous traditions of struggle throughout
American history. He provides one example after another which show how
the ideas of
socialism and communism are not alien importations, but rather, have
deep roots in the American tradition itself. In a series of short and
engaging articles,
he brings to vibrant life the heroic revolutionary and labor
traditions of this often-maligned country.
Historical Materialism
Unfortunately, many people regard history as dry and dusty—an endless
and disconnected recitation of dates and individuals. But history need
not be boring
or incoherent. In fact, armed with the Marxist method, the study of
history sheds a bright light on the present and is indispensable in
orienting our perspectives
for the future. Far from being monotonous and linear, history is a
rich and contradictory process, driven by the struggle over the
surplus wealth created
by the laboring masses. As Karl Marx explained in his introduction to
The Critique of Political Economy:
block quote
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter
into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
relations of production
appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material
forces of production. The totality of these relations of production
constitutes the economic
structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the general process
of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that
determines their existence, but their social existence that determines
their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material
productive
forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of
production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with
the property
relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations
turn into their
fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the
economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the
whole immense
superstructure.”
block quote end
This concisely sums up of the Marxist approach to history, also known
as “historical materialism.” Once we begin to understand history—not
as a random
series of unrelated episodes, but as an infinitely complex and tightly
interconnected chain of events involving mass social forces, in which
cause becomes
effect and effect becomes cause—a whole new world opens up. No longer
does it appear to be a more or less irrelevant collection of useless
trivia. Instead,
the experiences of past struggles of the working class come alive,
brimming with lessons for our own struggle to change the world today.
American history
As a young country, the history of the United States and its meteoric
rise to world prominence is compressed into a few intense centuries.
The richest
country on earth certainly has its vast natural resources to thank, in
part, for its position. But above all, it was built on the backs of
millions of
indigenous peoples, African slaves, European indentured servants, and
the endless stream of political and economic refugees from around the
world who have
searched for the “American Dream” on its shores.
In this extraordinary book, Alan introduces the reader the communistic
traditions of the Native Americans; the revolutionary-democratic
beliefs of the
Pilgrims; the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution,
and the revolutionary defeat the mighty British Empire by an army of
rural farmers
and urban artisans; Abraham’s Lincoln’s revolutionary war against
slavery and the expropriation of billions of dollars of human
property; the bitter struggles
of the early American labor movement, including the class battles of
the 1930s and beyond. In its pages, the history of class struggle in
the US truly
comes alive.
Class struggle
So just what is the class struggle? Simply defined, the class struggle
is the struggle over the surplus wealth created by the producing
classes. Will that
surplus go towards further enriching the minority that controls
society? Or will it go towards improving the quality of life of the
working majority who
actually produce the wealth? Or perhaps we can live in a world without
exploiters, where society democratically determines what is to be done
with the
wealth we collectively produce?
The ruling class is that class which controls the state and owns the
means of production of society—the land and natural resources, the
workshops and factories,
the banks. The actual producers of wealth are those who own nothing
but their ability to work, and are therefore either owned outright as
slaves, tied
to the land as feudal serfs, perhaps own a tiny plot of land on which
they scrape out an existence while still having to work and pay debts
to others,
or sell their labor power for a wage to a capitalist. That is the
simplified essence of the class struggle. In the modern era, that
struggle is above all
between the working class and the capitalist class.
Class society
Ever since humans first developed as a distinct species and branched
off from the rest of the animal world, we have organized ourselves in
various ways
in order to produce the necessities of life. We have come together in
an array of socio-economic structures, including primitive communism,
slavery, feudalism,
capitalism, and a wide variety of transitional and hybrid forms. For
the majority of our existence, we lived as communists in a classless
society, albeit
on a low technological level. But ever since the rise of classes, as
Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto, “the history of
all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggle.”
With the rise of class society came a division into differing layers
of people—castes and classes–each with a definite relationship to each
other and to
the means of production; that is, to the means by which we produce the
food we eat, the clothes we wear, the homes we live in, and everything
else we humans
have extracted from nature through our labor and creativity.
Broadly speaking, there are laboring classes, and those that live off
the labor of others. The exploiters and the exploited. The two main
contending classes
in the class struggle are those who own the key economic levers of
society—the means of production—and those who must work the means of
production of another
in order to survive.
Sometimes the class struggle takes place between different layers of
one and the same class, and sometimes the lines between the classes
are blurred, for
example in 1930s Spain, where the landlords were also capitalists, the
capitalists were landlords, and the Catholic Church was the biggest
landlord and
capitalist of them all. Or even in New York City today, where Trinity
Church is one of the biggest landlords and property owners, and
therefore a powerful
player in the city par excellence of finance capital. Talk about
uneven and combined development—something workers in the Indian
Subcontinent are all-too
familiar with.
All of this applies to the US just as much as any other country
dominated by capitalism—you cannot have an exploiting capitalist class
without a working
class that is being exploited. Long before US capitalism entered its
predatory, imperialist phase, the ruling class enriched itself on the
vast natural
resources and labor of millions of people right here on the American continent.
In fact, America’s more than 155 million workers are among the most
exploited on the planet. Based on an extremely high level of labor
productivity, American
workers create vast amounts of wealth for the capitalists, but receive
only a small ratio of that back in the form of wages. The effects of a
strike of
even a small portion of the American workers would be devastating to
the profits of the capitalists. For example, just 36,000 unionized
dock workers load
and unload every ship on the West coast of the United States. This
means that every single container imported to the US Pacific coast
from Asia and beyond
must first pass through the hands of a relative handful of union
workers. Even a one-day strike of these dockers would result in
billions of dollars in
losses to the capitalists. This is a clear indication of the colossal
power of the US working class.
The working class is the overwhelming majority of the USA; the wonders
of its cities, railroads, highways, mines, industry, and vast tracts
of farmland
are the result of the workers’ sweat, tears, blood, and brains. And
yet, Americans themselves are rarely taught the truth about their own
history. There
is a very simple reason for this. If American workers were to
understand their true power and their class’s repeated attempts to
change society, they might
be tempted to engage in open class struggle again and again—and this
represents a mortal threat to the continuation of the capitalist
system.