Trump’s denunciation of socialism in his State of the Union speech reflects the ruling class’s fear over the growth of the class struggle within the United States.
Source: The working class and socialism – World Socialist Web Site
Andre Damon
9 February 2019
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump capped his State of the Union speech by declaring, “Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country… Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
Just three days after Trump’s anti-socialist outburst, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report showing just what is motivating the fear of socialism: the growth of the class struggle. According to the BLS, the number of workers who went on strike last year was the highest since 1986—more than three decades. Last year, more than half a million US workers went on strike, a 20-fold increase over 2017.
The largest work stoppage was last April’s strike by 81,000 Arizona teachers and staff, resulting in 486,000 lost man-days. The strike by 20,000 Oklahoma teachers that same month resulted in 405,000 lost man-days. The BLS added, “Statewide major work stoppages in educational services also occurred in West Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado, and North Carolina.”
This wave of struggles has intensified in the New Year—in the United States, throughout North America, and all over the world. In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of teachers went on strike last month. Seventy thousand workers in auto plants in Matamoros, Mexico launched a major strike that is already disrupting auto production in the United States, and which is spreading to other sections of the working class.
And this is only the beginning.
Since the crushing of the PATCO strike in 1981, the American ruling class has presided over decades of deindustrialization, mass layoffs, and pay and benefit concessions. The trade unions have collaborated in implementing all these measures, selling out every struggle, endorsing every plant closure, and calling every defeat a victory.
This has resulted in the most dramatic upward redistribution of wealth in American history.
Just three people in the US control as much wealth as the bottom half of society. In the ten years since the 2008 financial crisis, the number of billionaires has nearly doubled. Every two days, a new billionaire is created.
Over the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $2.5 billion a day, while the wealth of the poorest half of humanity fell by a staggering 11 percent.
Nowhere within the political establishment is there any expression of the social and political interests of the vast majority of the population. Trump’s far-right politics is more and more basing itself on the central characteristic of every fascistic movement: the explicit hatred of socialism.
The Democratic Party, for its part, centers its politics on the repudiation of any appeal to the working class. It has instead sought to create a “populist” movement around an amalgamation of racial and cultural identities, based on the fiction that the basic social division is not class, but race and gender. This is the politics of the upper-middle class, competing over positions of power and privilege, aligned with dominant sections of the financial oligarchy and the military-intelligence apparatus.
In an effort at political chloroforming, the Democrats have elevated a handful of figures—such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—whose task is to provide a left gloss for a right-wing party.
In their replies to Trump’s State of the Union speech, however, both made clear that they are not, in fact, socialists. Asked if “socialism” is a “winning message,” Ocasio-Cortez declared, “at the end of the day, it’s not about an ‘ism.’ And I think that’s exactly what the president is trying to do. He’s trying to mischaracterize, frame, associate.”
In his 27-minute-long reply to Trump’s speech, Sanders refused to use the term socialism except as a pejorative, complaining that the United States has “socialism for the rich.”
Commenting on Trump’s invocation of the “Socialist Menace,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an apologist for the Democrats, declared, “Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the second coming of Leon Trotsky,” adding, “Let’s just hope that the rest of the media report the clean little secret of American socialism, which is that it isn’t radical at all.”
Krugman here is right. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are not “radical at all,” much less actual socialists.
One hundred and seventy years ago, at the birth of the modern socialist movement, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto that “It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”
Now, when this same “specter of communism” haunts the ruling class, socialists must state clearly what they stand for. Socialists call for not a few reforms, impossible under capitalism, but the seizure of the wealth of the ruling class and the total reorganization of society. We call for the transformation of the major corporations into public utilities, democratically controlled by the working class, to ensure the basic social right of everyone to health care, education, a good-paying job and a secure retirement.
There is an objective logic to the development of the class struggle. The struggles in individual workplaces and communities are bringing workers into ever more direct conflict with the anti-working class trade unions, requiring the formation of independent factory and workplace committees to unify broader sections of the working class.
Today, the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees and the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter are holding a demonstration to oppose the layoff of thousands of workers by General Motors and other auto companies. It will be a critical step in the organization of the working class, independently of the unions, against the dictates of the corporate and financial elite.
The developing struggles of the working class, moreover, will take on an ever more explicitly anti-capitalist orientation and socialist character. As Trump and the entire ruling class fear, the logic of working class struggles is toward a general strike, which will raise the question of political power and the reorganization of society on the basis of social need, not private profit.
The political program that represents the interests of the working class is socialism. To realize this program requires the building of a political leadership. The Socialist Equality Party, along with its sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International, is spearheading the fight to arm the objective working class movement with an uncompromising revolutionary strategy and socialist perspective.
A great article that hints at real change instead of the Ocasio-Cortez-Sanders cover-up malarkey. Nothing short of total revolution against the elites and banksters can ever change anything.
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There never was any ”Wild West”, the American ”War of Independence” and history is not at all how theyve said. And magnificent Tartarian architecture was already in San Francisco.It was a different kind of civilisation where money didnt exist
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Goodbye Blue Sky
1 week ago
If you go to practically any State , county, city or village, throughout The US, you will find the same story,
and very similar timelines.(with the exception of some cities on the east coast- NY, Phila, Wash DC)
They were “organized” around 1810 – 1820, They become incorporated around 1820
1830 and by 1855-1860 they are FULL BLOWN places. Cities are already laid out, Most have electric
trolleys or street cars, They have huge telephone poles (larger than today), Metal rods on all the buildings,
Very large, gorgeous, structures, dozens of “churches”, Banks, and State/ County Capital buildings.After 1850, there is just an explosion of citizens. Something just does not add up compared with what we are told and taught. These places go from supposedly having small log cabin buildings and saw mills to European style castles.
I would encourage everyone, …to do a search of your County,
and the cities /towns within it….and you will see it for yourself
Balker
1 week ago
It is the same story in Australia. Even small country towns with tiny populations have the same story. Truly undeniable in my eyes that we are being lied to on a scale most will never be able to comprehend.
Charlie Jeans
1 week ago
@Balker hey, I just did a few vids of Melbourne and country NSW, near Bathurst. Got one vid that is the holy grail, an electrical device on the roof of a church working. The aerial is found in 400 year old pictures every Where around the world, don’t know how this one survived, but it was recently refurbished with brass ribbon.
Planet Amnesia
1 week ago
Maybe without the Federal Reserve and the banksters stealing the people’s wealth, workers were naturally buoyant and hard working with old world skills. Maybe in a society that had less government and was open and ambitious, led to an amazing dedication that created beauty and majesty in all that it could produce. We have forgotten that such a society is possible to live in. Now that we are so dumbed down and lazy we think the builders must have been aliens or were a missing race. We’ve come a long way down the ladder in less than 200 years. That’s been the plan all along. Now we get to squabble over basic facts that should be self apparent. We live in an insane asylum. Nobody will agree on anything anymore, so enjoy this house of mirrors until it shatters. See you on the other side…
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I think it’s what the movie, “Pleasantville” was trying to explain. The real history of the US isn’t real.
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Soulful Truth
1 week ago
The Irish Famine began in 1845 and continued until 1849 with a million people fleeing while another million dropped dead – of the million who fled, perhaps half a million went to London and surrounding areas ( Prince Albert bragged that his rents had “quintupled” meaning he was earning five times what he was getting prior to the fake famine which the greedy hybrids engineered ) … we’re told about half a million Irish fled to the usa … this massive migration of people contributed to the cities suddenly bursting in population as the labor force quintupled … rough estimates … we’ve been lied to about history, we’ve been lied to about the technologies of the past, we’ve been lied to about the historical, biblical and geological timelines, we’ve been lied to about politics, economics, government, chemistry, geology, volcanology, glaciology … the parasites that control our world have lied, deceived, manipulated, exploited, raped and murdered since the beginning of time which wasn’t as long ago as the people have been told.
The ice ages are fiction, pangaea is fiction, continental drift is fiction, the timeline from ice cores is fiction, “millions of years ago is fiction” and so on. Julius Caesar and Cleopatra didn’t live thousands of years ago – neither did Ptolemy and Alexander the Great, neither did Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, King Solomon, King David, Moses, Jacob, Abraham or Noah… you’ve been lied to about all that … the timeline was artificially elongated because if you knew the true timeline, you’d know the true identity of the parasitic hybrid billionaires, their millionaire minions and their billions of underlings that lie, steal, rape and murder because they have no conscience, they feel no guilt, no remorse, no compassion and no empathy because they are not humans – they look human but only because of the influx of human DNA down through the generations but their ancestors were not humans – this is documented in the old literature from across the world – we also have the illustrations of the hybrids from the 1400’s and 1500’s and we have some of their skulls, skeletons and mummies
– so we know they are evil incarnate, we know who their ancestors were and we know they will soon be eradicated from our Earth – please be advised that all the major cataclysms are documented in historic records – including the cataclysms that broke and subducted tectonic plates, the cataclysms that formed the ocean trenches, the cataclysms that formed the mountain ranges, the cataclysms that formed the ocean waters and so on – none of this is a mystery and none of this occurred millions or billions of years ago – none of it occurred thousands of years ago either – not easy to get your head around this but when you admit you’re being dumbed down, drugged up, poisoned, drugged and programmed with lies and lunacy across the full spectrum of deception, you can set aside the programming and look beyond the prison of lies to see the conspicuous evidence. Thank you for your comments.
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Tartarian City of Norumbega was conquered to become Washington, DC
stolenhistory.org/threads/tartarian-city-of-norumbega-was-conquered-to-become-washington-dc.590/
Tartarian Symbols at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York
https://www.stolenhistory.org/threads/tartarian-symbols-at-the-1901-pan-american-exposition-in-buffalo-new-york.795/
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I’ll say this in reply, that I always “knew” (at least in this life which is soon ending for me, no regrets) that we have been living in a kind of sci-fi bubble of bullshit; that our technology is manufactured, not invented and that Velikovsky’s timeline on catastrophism is the closest we currently have to the truth as it relates to “time”. I’ve also known that “time” is pure fiction, an invention for control no different than banksterism is predatory capitalism’s magic wand.
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adamspiritualwarrior says:
February 11, 2019 at 2:51 PM
Another example of the World Fair being used as an excuse to demolish great architecture was the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893. Once again these buildings look as if they came straight out of Atlantis. This so called fair was the size of a small city.
https://i.imgur.com/R6mCycy.jpg (We are supposed to believe all this was built just to be used for a couple months and then demolished)
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The Blue Current matter called “science” is a fraud created by dishonest pseudo ”scientists” by order of their masters.
When knights and princes of Gaul, who belonged to Tartary, were betrayed, defeated and massacred by mercenaries commanded by the British and French “gray eminences”, their lands, estates and castles were taken and the “unified” territory was named “France” in 1870 and became part of the newly born German Empire headed by the strongman Bismarck.
From then on, through the invention of the nonexistent French Revolution of 1789 – which actually happened in the 19th century with the legitimate popular revolt against the tyranny and crimes of Napoleon III and his masters from the Anglo-German alliance and was harshly repressed with Krupp cannons pointed against the people – some French collaborated closely with their British lords to cover up the gigantic historical fraud and consolidate the seizure of power effected in the 20th century, as well as eliminate all traces of our Pre-Flood civilization.
For this, they did not hesitate to invent the character “Albert Einstein”, represented by an unknown French Duke de Broglie, to obscure and annul all previous scientific knowledge and to launch an ocean of academic fraud designed to hide the sophisticated technology of High Civilization that preceded us. Even today, these Gray Men command the French nation and put in government a puppet who likes to go hand in hand with his own father, a French billionaire disguised under a blonde wig, with some plastic surgeries, who smiles a lot and carries the name of Brigitte.
https://www.facebook.com/…/a.18924…/1909433575757766/…
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Christalmighty! Look at Chicago before it was demolished! https://imgur.com/iiT1BqW
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The Blue Yes. A war between worlds. There are many other worlds. Russian writers cite weapons capable of melting rocks and leaving them black, as in Yakutia, Russia. Below I give the link to these awesome photos. The enemy had weapons capable of launching a chemical “foam” with a stone texture to cover the remains of our ancient civilization. And also able to form storms that poured tons of sand over old cities in Africa and turned forests into deserts. Earth did not have the current extremes of temperature. The temperature was mild in Siberia and Greenland, and there were hundreds of cities that disappeared from the maps as well as Africa. In Africa there is a lake called Victoria that does not exist on previous maps. And in the Yakutia region there are 800,000 craters of bombs that the flood waters have turned into lakes in their passage. Those who rule the world today would be just foremen of these enemies of Humanity.
https://www.facebook.com/…/a.18924…/1907425029291954/…
The Blue Mark “Twain” in the lab of “Nikola Tesla”, early 1894.
“Twain” means mercury.
The mark of mercury…
And all this “genius” and “great inventors” are fake.
Non existant people.
Before them there was a high technology that was purposely destroyed. Everything they’ve “invented” has existed before.
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