Breaking the Corporate Hold on America

The American people are beginning to fight the corporate takeover of our country. And they are getting fed up with just about every professional politician and both “major” political parties. The government and both parties are more and more exposed as instruments of the corporations and of a capitalist class that doesn’t give a damn about the people’s needs and is unfit to run this country. Something new is developing in America.

Congress and the president collaborate on a plan to cut trillions of dollars in federal spending on programs that the people depend on. Similar cuts are taking place at the state and local level. At the same time, over the past decade the federal government has spent trillions of dollars in public money handing tax cuts to the rich and bailing out the banks and other corporations. The people are asking, where is our bailout?

Labor-replacing electronic technology (the computer and the robot) is eliminating jobs and wiping out the economic foundation of the capitalist system. This is the root of the crisis, and the basis of the dissatisfaction that is sweeping the country. Over half of voters say a third party is needed.

What is most significant is that more and more Americans have no reason to be loyal to a capitalist system that cannot feed or house them. The economic bond that holds the capitalists and the working class together is being shattered by falling wages, rising unemployment and spreading poverty. This, combined with the government’s obvious willingness to serve the corporations at the expense of the people, is forcing workers to begin breaking the ideological and political bonds that hold them to the capitalists. By a margin of about three to one, Americans feel the country is on the wrong track. Other polls show that eight out of ten Americans mistrust the government, and a plurality call themselves political independents.

In the near future, we will see one or more new “third” parties arise as alternatives to the Democrats and Republicans. However, some of these parties will in reality be bankrolled by the wealthy as efforts to maintain the ties between workers and capitalists and mislead the people. Revolutionaries should nonetheless see them as an indispensable step along the path toward freedom. Nothing can be accomplished without breaking the bonds that tie the workers to the capitalists through the Democratic and Republican parties. A third party will help develop people’s understanding that the people and the corporations have separate interests.

If the conscious revolutionaries play their role as teachers and point the way forward, sooner or later an independent party of the workers will be formed that will represent the interests of the workers versus the corporations. At each step in the process, we have to act with the understanding that we are fighting for the political power to build a new society.

Either we take over the corporations and run them in the interest of society, or they take over society and run it in their interest. If they win, we will be living in poverty under corporate fascism. We are not fighting for more scraps from the table. We are not fighting to reform the corporations. We are fighting for a new world where we, the people, have the power to say what will happen. The future is up to us.