Image by Glenn Halog via Flickr
by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Dec. 16, 2019
December 19, 2019
The United States, like the other parts of the world that have been ravaged by rampant economic inequality and corporate despotism, is headed for a social breakdown. This gets more apparent every time wealth disparity is shown to be at a decades-high level, every time the military budget is expanded billions of dollars to fight endless wars, every time the country’s militarized police shoots an innocent person. Ten or twenty years from now, our society’s current form will have taken on an extreme version of itself: no real freedoms, basically no semblance of democracy, and conditions for the majority of people that are in or approaching squalor.
You can get a sense of where the country is headed by looking at how bad things have already gotten for much of America’s population. Around a third of American households can’t afford food, water, or shelter without at the least going deeper into debt, and around two-thirds have been able to save little or no money. Over 40 million Americans aren’t even making enough money to have a reliable supply of nutritious food. So many in the former middle class are living on the edge of a major upheaval, struggling to navigate a situation where no amount of working and saving will bring down their ever-increasing debt.
Nearly ten million Americans lost their homes as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, and when the even worse upcoming crisis hits the impact will no doubt be even bigger. The United States will come to resemble Chile, which we typically think of as a much poorer country than the U.S. but that also has an official poverty rate of around 10%. What’s caused the broad masses of Chile to take to the streets is that while most Chileans aren’t technically in poverty, half of Chilean workers make $550 or less every month. The next crash will make a similar situation materialize in the U.S., one where most people in the country can no longer sustain their relatively comfortable living arrangements.
This process of economic collapse as a result of inequality and financial oligarchy is going to make the 2020s a lot more violent for the United States than the 2010s were. And given the frequent police brutality, numerous mass shootings, and multiple riots that have happened throughout the country in the last ten years, that’s saying a lot. When people no longer feel like they have anything to lose by rebelling against the system, great unrest will appear.
When this unrest starts-which will likely be during the early 2020s, given that the economic crash is estimated to very likely happen within the next two years-the government will crack down, suspending liberties and confronting protests in the same brutal ways that Chile’s government has been doing. We’ll see America’s militarized police, which have become more empowered than ever during the Trump era to use army-level weapons, fulfill their anticipated purpose of killing dozens or even hundreds of protesters.
Like has also been the case in Chile, the army will likely get involved in the efforts to suppress the protests. It became legal for the U.S. president to use the military as a domestic police force with the passage of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, and Trump has already utilized this power by sending troops to the border. The fascist paramilitaries that Trump has emboldened will join the side of this police/army junta, carrying out operations to protect reactionary political interests. This will be a more extreme and widespread version of when right-wing militias partnered with fugitive Oregon Republican senators earlier this year.
The economic collapse will be just one part of the breakdown. As the country’s climate change-created crises continue to escalate, so will the process of militarization and the disappearance of freedoms. And so will the advancement of crisis capitalism, where corporations profit from disaster and resources are privatized as a result of an emergency. We’ll see more scenarios like the one in Puerto Rico during the 2017 hurricane season, where masked and armed members of the private military contractor Academi roamed the streets of Puerto Rico’s capital while a series of privatizations were unleashed throughout the territory.
As this chaos develops, the fascists and their centrist enablers will blame the poor for stepping out of line. The protesters will be characterized by the corporate media as hooligans who are asking too much from the government. The remaining social services will be cut while the big banks get another vast government grant. Politicians will try to shift the blame for the crisis onto immigrants and onto foreign powers like China. But as hard as the capitalist reaction to the crisis will be, those who want revolution will be able to carry out great change.
Part of what we’ll need to do to overcome the capitalist state is sustain the protests and strikes amid government repression. The anti-austerity protests in France have gone on for over fifty weeks despite bans and police violence, an achievement we’ll be able to emulate in America by building strong revolutionary institutions. Another part will be guiding the protest movement towards communism, instead of letting it be co-opted by pro-capitalist leaders who pose as socialists. Like happened recently in France, where hundreds of Communist Party of France flags have been lined up during the country’s largest strike in a century, we’ll need to make proletarian revolution the cohesive goal of the uprising.
These will be the first stages of our mission. The next ones will be defeating the U.S. government’s security forces, and then taking control of the capitalist state according to the revolutionary lessons of Leninism. This will require recognizing the reality that there’s a moral difference between the violence of the oppressors and the violence of the oppressed. Violence isn’t innately immoral, it’s a tool that both the upper and lower classes have always used to help shift the balance of power.
When the crisis of capitalism comes to a breaking point in the United States, the upper classes will try to say the lower classes are immoral for using violence and other tools for creating political change. But the fact is that the upper classes are the ones who are already using numerous forms of violence against the lower classes. And as the country heads in an inevitably violent direction, our job will be to steer this situation towards a proletarian revolution.
Rainer uses the written word to deconstruct establishment propaganda and to promote meaningful political action. His articles can also be found at Revolution Dispatch.
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. Follow Rainer on Twitter, Youtube and Medium.
[DS added the video interview.]
19-year-old Rainer Shea is a proud American communist, shouting it out-Frost’s road less traveled!
Jeff J. Brown on Dec 13, 2019
Rainer Shea is fighting to have a socially just and equal stake for humanity’s 99%. In neoliberal, uber-capitalist America, that’s taking Robert Frost’s less traveled road, where life’s uncertain risks and meaningful rewards are found.
Source article with all the images and hyperlinks: 19-Year-Old Rainer Shea Is A Proud American Communist, Shouting It Out- Robert Frost’s Road Less Traveled!
Much more at China Rising, Look Who Is Praising The China Trilogy: The Votes Are In – It R-O-C-K-S! What Are You Waiting For?
From the archives:
Landslide… To Totalitarianism by Gaither Stewart
Chris Hedges: Huge Swathes of the US Really Struggle in Dire Circumstances
The Rise of America’s Fascist Paramilitaries by Rainer Shea
The Problem is Civil Obedience by Howard Zinn + Matt Damon Reads from Howard Zinn’s Speech
What Would Happen If We All Refused To Go Quietly To The Slaughterhouse? + The Roots of Resistance
Abby Martin: Trump Expands Police-State Crackdown on the Left
Dandelion Salad 
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I wish that revolution were as simple as Rainer suggests. But I don’t believe it is. Rainer seems to be assuming that our population will see things as they really are, despite a century of propaganda. The revolution that Rainer calls for requires a population that is much more awake and aware than our population is.
Rainer recommends France as a model to follow. But the USA is much less aware than the people of France. In fact, most of the people in the USA have no idea what is going on in France, and if they were told, they would have no understanding of it.
I think the question to ask is not “what should we do, given our present situation?” Rather, the question to ask is, “what should we do, given what our population is presently able to see of our present situation?”
For that question, the best answer I’ve seen is Bernie Sanders. He is saying things that people can understand. He is not calling for a socialist revolution as you and I would define it, but nevertheless he is leading people along what may be the first few steps toward socialist revolution.
Bernie’s program consists largely of what I believe Marxists have sometimes called “transitional demands.” These are demands which would seem reasonable if the claims capitalists make about capitalism were actually true — for instance, tax the rich. But they are actually demands which cannot be met without undermining capitalism. The capitalists’ resistance to these demands exposes their true nature, and thus shatters the propaganda they have used to sustain the acquiescence of the populace.
We can abandon Bernie as soon as he ceases leading us in a good direction, but until then I’d recommend following him and building a movement around him. He’s doing a good job at spreading ideas and building a movement, a better job than any socialist party has done in many years.
I absolutely no faith in the Democratic Party to have Sanders as their nominee.
I have no certainty that the DNC won’t cheat Bernie again. But this time a lot more people will be watching more closely for that sort of thing. If the DNC cheats Bernie again, I think the Democratic Party will lose many members, and so it will shrink to a party with far less power.
Thus, I see Bernie as a game-changer EITHER WAY. That is also true for “transitional demands” — whether they are granted or not, they raise consciousness, and so they are still a game-changer.
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As the old adage states: The revolution will be televised.
But not all of it.
Not the part/s where the paramilitary police forces shoot the protesters or send in agent provocateurs to start trouble.
Not the part/s where children, women, men and senior citizens are trampled on, kicked, beaten and bloodied by paramilitary police forces.
No, not those parts.
Just the parts where the protesters are screaming, jostling and waving ‘unseemly’ placards at the psychopaths who rule.
Fancy that.
A censored revolution.
Good points, Fair dinkum.