The dramatic ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is just the latest iteration of an unfolding and rapidly developing political crisis that has unsettled the traditional parties and opened the door for a whole host of ideological monstrosities. Solving this crisis will require the independent action of the entire working class.

Perpetual Crisis and Political Monsters

The removal of McCarthy is only the latest in a long series of political, economic, and environmental crises that have rocked the U.S. since the economic collapse of 2008. Since then, the U.S. has experienced three government shutdowns, the election of a billionaire reality-TV star (now facing several state and federal felony charges), two impeachment trials, a contested presidential election, a nationwide uprising against police violence, the storming of the U.S. Capitol by bloodthirsty, far-right protesters, a global pandemic, two years of out-of-control inflation, and a historic economic crisis (with another recession potentially on the way). And now, after many years of relative quiescence, the labor movement in the United States is waking up with strikes and the threat of strikes spreading throughout several sectors of the economy, adding even more fuel to the fire. These events, and the decades of neoliberal misrule that preceded them—which weakened U.S. unions and dismantled the inadequate social safety net—have only exacerbated the underlying political crisis that has been developing since even before the 2016 election.

Fed up with declining wages, layoffs, deindustrialization, massive income inequality, precarious employment, cuts to social services, rising housing and education costs, and the financialization of everything, the working class and the downwardly mobile—often self-employed—petit-bourgeois have turned on their traditional political leaders. On the Left this has meant a growing interest in socialism and social democracy of the variety put forward by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez—a warmed over version of the already vanishing European welfare state. On the Right, however, it has led to a whole series of what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “morbid symptoms.” These include crises like the one we are seeing in Congress now, as well a growing reactionary populism grounded in the misguided belief in a glorious past and an often xenophobic, racist, and nationalist authoritarian politics. This new Right, as Nancy Fraser has well argued, was formed in the cauldron of anger and dissatisfaction with the prevailing bi-partisan political project of “progressive neoliberalism”—an ideology best represented by the “girl boss” politics of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 Presidential bid.

This growing population of disgruntled voters has opened up political space for far-right populists like Trump and the members of the Republican Freedom Caucus to develop a base of hardline supporters, who no longer see their interests aligned with that of the traditional Republican Party and, in some cases, the U.S. state more broadly, which they view as inherently corrupted. It is this fundamental distrust of the establishment that allows billionaire populists like Trump to rally millions of voters to “drain the swamp” even as he is found guilty of several counts of fraud. Though somewhat weakened by the overreach of the Capitol riots of January 2021 and the Republicans’ poor performance in the midterm elections, this disgruntled population has nonetheless continued to gain significant influence in U.S. politics. For instance, despite—or perhaps because of—the many indictments against Trump, polls show that more than two thirds of Republican voters continue to say that the 2020 election was stolen, and Trump is already the de facto nominee for the 2024 elections, with at least one recent Quinnipiac poll showing him leading Biden by two points in a general election. Most other polls show a very tight race, well within the margin or error.

Despite the crisis in the House and the Democrats’ attempts to portray the Republicans as incompetent louts, dissatisfaction with the regime is only growing, and the Far Right, by raising criticisms of the economy and even, to some extent, U.S. foreign policy, has, in contrast to the Democratic party establishment, been able to paint itself as the defenders of the “common man.” Without a real political alternative, many working people will continue to fall prey to these ideas, further weakening and dividing the power of the working class.

Solving the Capitalist Crisis Requires Independent Working Class Politics and Class struggle

While support for Congress (never very popular to begin with) has unsurprisingly waned, polls also show that labor unions, strikes, and workers’ struggles have become more popular than ever. Two thirds of Americans polled by Gallup said they approve of labor unions, while a decisive 75 percent said they stand with the United Auto Workers (UAW) in their current strike against The Big Three, and 72 percent support the entertainment workers’ strike. This new level of working-class consciousness is part of a bigger backlash against neoliberalism that began with the 2018-19 teachers’ strikes—part of a wave of labor resistance that was temporarily interrupted by the pandemic. The new level of militancy we are witnessing now, best represented by the ongoing UAW and Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) strikes, is at once both a continuation and an escalation of those earlier labor struggles. The pandemic, as well as the uprising against police violence in the Summer of 2020, not only forced workers, like those at Amazon’s warehouse in Staten Island, to organize to protect their health, but revealed, in the most fundamental way, that working people have power, that they truly are essential, and that the world does not run without their labor. Thankfully, the wave of unionization efforts, strike threats, and strikes that have followed show no sign of slowing down. Last week, 75,000 health care workers walked out at Kaiser Permanente, 40,000 picketing hospitality workers are now on the verge of a potential strike, and UAW President Shawn Fain just spontaneously called out another 9,000 workers in the middle of a contract meeting with Ford executives.

This new labor militancy shows the material and political power of the working class and can be a potent antidote to the influence of the Far Right in the midst of this political crisis. While unions are no panacea for racist or nationalist politics (indeed, they have unfortunately sometimes been bastions of such ideologies in the past), labor struggles and workplace organization do offer an alternative outlet for the often legitimate economic and social grievances that fuel such ideas. In fact, it is only through the self-organization of the working class and class struggle that racism, homophobia, nationalism, economism, and facile individualism can be challenged—through debate and discussion, but more importantly through experience. There is no better teacher, after all, for understanding the problems of capitalism and the importance of solidarity than class struggle.

It is no surprise then, that President Biden and former President Trump are each attempting to co-opt this new movement, both in order to win the 2024 election and to contain it and keep it neatly aligned to the interests of the state. But we cannot fool ourselves into believing that we should thus use this power to support one or the other of these two candidates. Instead, we have to take advantage of the growing working-class consciousness that these struggles have created in order to build a larger more militant labor movement, to unite our struggles, and to spread strikes to every sector of the economy, private and public. But even more important than this, we must also learn how to use the power of labor to confront the state, to make demands of the state, to win demands from the state, and, when that fails, not to resign ourselves to despair, but to continue to build the organizations we will need to win. This includes building an independent working-class party with a socialist platform that can address the political crisis by channeling the anger and frustration of the working classes into working-class struggles and not back into the capitalists’ parties. But it also includes independent organizing within our unions and workplaces to confront our bureaucratic leaders who would try to tie us to this or that bourgeois party.

The dysfunction in the House reveals more than ever the need to use working-class methods to abolish these institutions and replace them with a single united congress that puts the decisions of the country into the hands of the working class. As CLR James said, “every cook can govern” and it is with this spirit that we must confront the political crisis before us.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Liu Tingting

From: https://www.leftvoice.org/the-solution-to-the-political-crisis-is-in-the-hands-of-the-working-class/（2023-10-13）