For the Concerned Liberal
When you were young, you were taught to believe in the truth and goodness of the American way. Like many things we were told as children, that turned out to be a fairy tale. You care about people — about the people who are out of a job, the people who live day to day and hand to mouth, about the Black people who have been mistreated for so long in this country, about Indigenous people who are still being exterminated, about gay people and trans people who are being forced to hide who they are and face daily violence, about people with student debt, with medical debt, about the little children forced to mine Coltan to make our phones. You care. And you’re upset! You’re confused. Things have stopped making sense.
That’s because the story you were told was a lie. When our understanding of the world no longer lines up with the things we see, we have to rethink that understanding. When our internal narratives no longer match objective facts, we have to acknowledge they were wrong. We were wrong. It’s hard to be wrong, but only when we bravely confront our errors can we try to correct them.
What did we believe that was wrong?
That we were the good guys.
What? But surely we are! We care! We want to help. We’ve done everything we can! We’ve been shocked at the way our country has shifted ever rightward. We’ve supported peace, we’ve been against bloodshed, and for justice… haven’t we?
No.
No, because there is no truth, no justice, no American way. There’s no such thing.
The fact of the matter is, to the great masses of people all around the world, we are the bad guys. That hurts to hear — that people see the United States not as a beacon of freedom, but as the Angel of Death. But we can’t afford to lie to ourselves anymore. We have to wake up. We have to understand.
To make sense of the twin nightmares of Biden and Trump, of the ludicrous pageant of the Harris “campaign,” we have to go back and actually grapple with the truth — the truth that the United States and its ruling class have been enriching themselves at the expense of the other nations and peoples of the world since the day the country was born. To understand today, we need to understand yesterday. To predict tomorrow, we have to have a clear comprehension of our trajectory. History isn’t static. It isn’t a single moment in time. It is the weight of every yesterday carrying it inexorably forward into tomorrow.
So, how do we make sense of this?
First, we have to discard one of our most cherished illusions: the illusion of democracy. It is of great importance to the people who own the vast majority of this country (the top 10 largest individual landowners in the U.S. own 15.5 million acres of land, roughly the size of West Virginia, more than the land owned by all racial minorities combined) that we believe that we have an investment in its government. The truth is, we do not. This country is now and always has been a democracy for the rich. In the 18th century the U.S. was founded as a democracy for southern aristocrats and northern lawyers and merchants. Today, it is a democracy for property-owning capitalists. And they own a lot more than you.
If it’s all a sham, why do they bother keeping it up? For one thing, our ruling class isn’t always on the same page about what policies to pursue. They have legitimate disputes between themselves, and they resolve these disputes by throwing money at them and mobilizing “votes” in support of their preferred policies. As a result we, the regular, non-owning, working people in this country, are lobbied and pleaded to. We are treated as a passive, inactive mass to be cajoled, guilted, and outright tricked into putting our support behind a certain candidate, one preselected by our ruling class. Because of this, we develop a psychological attachment not only to that candidate, but to the whole system. It’s like watching a TV show that you talk about at work. We, the audience, feel a sense of involvement and connection. We discuss it, we theorize about it, we engage. However, we’re just the audience. We have no say in how the story unfolds — the bourgeois electoral system is no different. Our participation is strictly limited. At best, we are background actors, playing the part the scriptwriters and stage managers permit — but despite what we may do or say in those roles, the show will always go on.
There are certain things those stage managers will never allow. It is, after all, their show. We’re invited to come on from time to time, but we all know who owns the studio.
Among the things we cannot contest are the following: we aren’t allowed to object to all the wars our country has engaged in; we aren’t allowed to demand the forgiveness of debts; we aren’t allowed to challenge the decisions of the courts; we aren’t allowed to challenge the choice of candidates we are presented with; we aren’t allowed to contest the omnipresent armies of the police on our streets or the theft of land by huge corporations like Mandy Realty or Blackrock. We aren’t allowed to object to the burning of the planet for profit, or to argue for equality between the sexes, for freedom of choice and conscience, against racism, against transphobia. But why? Why aren’t we allowed to challenge these things? Because of a more basic assumption that’s key to the existence of the United States. We cannot challenge these things, we cannot be allowed to begin down the road to liberation from any of these assumptions, because that road ultimately threatens the very existence of the United States and its underlying system. It threatens the U.S. “way of life.” This system, this basic assumption, this underlying bedrock, is capitalist property.
What is capitalist property? It is the dividing of the world (of land, of productive machinery, of resources) into the individual hands of a select few. It is the source of the capitalist relation, the rule that says one man owns while another person works. It is the source of all social oppression – racism, sexism, anti-trans and anti-gay bigotry — and it arises from the property relation of capital.
What would happen if we challenged this property relation? If we could, by vote, abolish this root evil, if we could help every one of the people we said we cared about, what would happen to the wealthy? The wealthy capitalists, who own everything, would be at the same moment and by the same vote, disinherited of all the wealth of the world. Through their bankers and colonial agents, they command almost every source of wealth there is. This is what they stand to lose. Why, then, would they design a costume ball where the rules permit them to be disenfranchised? They wouldn’t. They haven’t.
Above everything, this is the one outcome they will not allow. Nothing that might open the door to begin that process can be permitted. War, from which all the wealthy profit, is a universal policy.
What we must understand is that the politics of Washington are the politics of wealthy white men. They have spent the last two hundred and fifty years ensuring they remain in control, and they inherited a social system of rules from Europe that were designed to keep European men in command. Through the import of Black African slave and marginalized European wage labor, these white, mostly English, men built the United States.
It is theirs. Root and branch.
Oh, they may have let some of those European immigrants into the club — after all, it’s hard to tell an Italian from a southern German at a distance — but they strengthened the barriers they could and clung to whatever rules they were able. Make no mistake — the United States still belongs to a handful of wealthy families. It isn’t yours, and it isn’t mine.
So we have the two wings of the owning class, the “left” and the right. Since the late 1930s, these two branches of one single American “business party” have taken contrary positions on certain issues, but when the chips are down, the Democratic Party has not actually, institutionally, protected or advocated for any marginalized group since 1950. The achievements of subject nations, sexes, and sexualities — the Civil Rights movement, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation — have been forced on the ruling class by concerted struggle.
It has been the working people of this country that have won every meaningful reform. As soon as we relax, snap! The ruling class takes it away!
No more. We are done with the bait and switch. We are done with the ruling class. Now it is time to take matters into our own hands.
We must have a militant party of the working classes! Our enemies are not only the Trump bloc, but all the capitalists behind them. We oppose not only the Trump government, but any Democratic Party government. Our enemy is the capitalist state, which is nothing more than a machine to mediate the disputes of the ruling class and to keep the workers from taking the rightful fruits of their labors.
But where to begin?
We must each study the question for ourselves. We recommend you find some like-minded friends who are equally disgusted at the trajectory of this country. We suggest you form a study circle. Read articles from the Clarion. Debate them. Decide if you agree. Write counter-articles. Study your own workplaces. Write reports about them. Share them. Debate them again.
Read radical literature together.
Learn.
Organize.
Prepare.
Suggested Reading
- A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
- Principles of Communism, Friedrich Engels
- Liberalism, a Counter History, Domenico Losurdo
- Class Struggle, Domenico Losurdo
- Dialectical and Historical Materialism, J.V. Stalin
- Dawning of the Apocalypse, Gerald Horne
- State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin
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