29-07-2024: The United States of America faces its largest political crisis in its history. As with most political crises, it is the working class and the poor that suffer the most. Staggering inequality reigns as wealth accumulates in the hands of an ever-smaller number of billionaires. At the same time, the cost of living for the masses is close to the highest it has ever been, with wages flatlining and basic costs like housing and food continuing to increase. Thousands are homeless and live on the streets. Billions are spent on fueling and provoking wars overseas, bringing a world war ever closer. Billions of taxpayer dollars go to a bloated military, or proxy forces fighting wars for US imperialism. Political repression and the steady erosion of basic democratic rights continue apace, even after the fraudulent “Covid pandemic” has receded. Ever more extreme weather portends a climate crisis of unforeseen proportions. Meanwhile, the two corporate parties of US capitalism can only produce two candidates of the same outdated “political” machine, and only one of them possibly might take some actions that the deep state and its corporate backers disapprove of. There has to be much more than this.
“Fear No Evil”
After Joe Biden (due to obvious cognitive decline) withdrew as the Democrats’ Presidential candidate in favor of Kamala Harris, she and the Republicans’ Donald Trump offer nothing to working people in the US. Potentially a Trump Administration may scale down NATO’s Ukraine proxy war on Russia, but it may also ramp up war provocations against the giant People’s Republic of China (PRC). War abroad is linked directly to the war at home – the assault on living standards, crumbling infrastructure, lack of funding for education, healthcare and basic services. There are many smaller parties and independents running for US President in 2024, but one stands out as a genuine alternative to the dire state of affairs which is the status quo. Under the slogan of “Fear No Evil”, Emanuel Pastreich, a pro-working-class academic, is offering a genuine alternative in taking on the major forces which indeed appear to confront US citizens as an evil. Pastreich is not asking people merely to vote in November, but to join a struggle to transform the US itself.[1] Pastreich is encouraging mass involvement of the people to educate themselves while participating themselves in the rebuilding of their society and its institutions.
We agree with Pastreich on three of the main pillars of his campaign. Firstly, he is calling not only for the withdrawal of scientifically unsupported and eminently dangerous Covid vaccines, but that the corporations that promoted the whole scandalous exercise have their assets seized, their leadership arrested, and the investors prosecuted.[2] The entire Covid operation was a direct attack on working people and must never be permitted to happen again. Secondly, he recognizes that one of the root sources of the political crisis facing the US is the almost complete takeover of society by giant corporations which are unaccountable to anyone, and yet have almost unlimited power. Banks and financial firms like Bank of America, BlackRock and State Street vacuum up wealth, while Big Tech firms such as Google, Oracle, Facebook and Amazon control vast amounts of commerce while reducing people to passive consumers. Thirdly, Pastreich is seeking an end to all US imperialist wars, which not only threaten the safety and security of the world but draw vast amounts of resources away from the desperately needed construction and rebuilding of basic infrastructure and elementary public services for people within the US. Many candidates and parties speak out about various conflicts, but what his required is genuine opposition to any war on Russia, China, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, the DPRK and more.
Action needed to avoid collapse
We recommend a critical vote for Emanuel Pastreich, as there are some aspects of his stated program on which we demur. For example, we certainly share the sentiment that the onset of a civilization ending world war could result from the unending provocations of US imperialism towards the Eurasian powers and their allies. This must be avoided at all costs. However, the call for the disarmament of all nations irrespective of imperialism will leave the non-imperialist countries unable to defend themselves. While we would not oppose any arms control treaties conducted internationally[3], the task for working people is to disarm the capitalist classes who are driving the world towards world war. It should be recognized that the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and others) is a non-imperialist alliance which does not at all seek destructive wars, and indeed seeks to avoid them. Nonetheless, Pastreich and the Green Liberty PAC will be strong anti-war allies into the future.
We can partially agree also with Pastreich’s critiques of the movement ostensibly against the Israeli state’s massacres of Palestinians since October last year. While of course a movement against these crimes is necessary, Pastreich points out that this movement does not mention several taboo topics. He writes that Israeli intelligence was involved in the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001, that it was a major partner in the Covid terror operation, and that the Israeli state and Hamas were involved in the horror of the October 7 terrorist attacks.[4] These elements can hardly be denied, but we would add that larger geopolitical aims are at play – such as drawing Iran, Hezbollah and even Yemen into a wider regional war. Such a catastrophe in the Middle East would only benefit US/UK imperialism, which is unfortunately willing to unleash wars they cannot win out of desperation.
We agree with Pastreich that the collapse of biodiversity and the climate of the Earth, the soil, the rivers, the oceans and forests are being destroyed by ruthless corporate greed, which could lead to the extinction of human civilization. While climate change and the desecration of the natural environment are all too real, this does not mean that we should not be able to see through bogus “climate change” policies which aim to make working people pay, or scaremonger them into accepting a very narrow version of a climate emergency. It is possible that deliberate fires are being ignited to frighten people into accepting whatever corporate funded “climate” solution is pushed on them. While we would generally support a move towards the end of fossil fuel burning for energy, all zero carbon energy sources – solar, wind, nuclear and others – need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. Also, we could not support any moves to ban private vehicles or prevent the rollout of electric zero emission vehicles. At the same time, we would also reject false “climate” plans such as “15-minute cities” which seek to reduce or block the movement and travel of working people.
For a workers’ party!
The Workers League would generally agree with the sentiment of the 20 planks of Pastreich’s 2024 platform.[5] As Marxists we would digress on plans for the reform of the United Nations (UN) and the plans for an Earth Congress. With the working class in power all or most of the nations of the world, a “United Nations” of that sort could play a role in the prevention of war, and in the coordination of responses to many international problems – above all the climate. Currently, however, while capitalism currently retains power over the majority of the planet, the UN and an Earth Congress, however well intentioned, will be unviable. Despite the extreme limitations of Stalinism as a deformed version of authentic socialism, workers retain governing power in the PRC and a handful of other states. What is required are proletarian political revolutions in the East, combined with socialist revolutions in the West. Pastreich seems to gloss over the question of conservative bureaucratic rule in the current and former socialistic states such as the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) – a former degenerated workers’ state which finally collapsed in 1989-92 following a political counter-revolution in 1923-24. To his credit however, he acknowledges that most of the freedom movement (the movement which emerged to resist the Covid terror regime) and “truth tellers” ignore or denounce anything to do with Marxism or socialism or anything from that tradition, and that this is a major flaw.[6] He rightly points out that anti-capitalists and workers must at least return to the path of how to plan and carry out a revolution, so the various socialist traditions should not and cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Hence, we urge those in the US to cast a vote for Emanuel Pastreich for President in 2024. At the same time, all of the critical issues that Pastreich raises and correctly insists on action about can only be addressed by the raising of the US working class to political power, by constructing its own state and its own administration. Such a momentous turn of events will no doubt spur similar revolutions internationally and can begin the socialization of the major means of production – the taking of the major means of wealth production into public hands. Industries that have been used by capitalist enterprise for hundreds of years can then be placed in the service of society, to address massive inequality, crumbling infrastructure, housing for all, critical climate measures and more, in the course of a vast expansion of democratic rights, far surpassing any previously achieved under class societies. This will require the leadership of a vanguard Leninist-Trotskyist party, to illuminate the path up and away from capitalist chaos and misery and towards a socialism where those who labor will rule.
Workers League
E: workersleague@protonmail.com
[1] www.emanuelpastreich24.org/vision/ (24-07-2024)
[2] www.emanuelprez.substack.com/p/the-blue-screen-of-death (24-07-2024)
[3] www.emanuelpastreich24.org/the-dawn-of-a-new-era-of-meaningful-and-rigorous-arms-control/ (25-07-2024)
[4] www.emanuelprez.substack.com/p/is-the-bionanoit-axis-planning-total (25-07-2024)
[5] www.emanuelpastreich24.org/policy/ (25-07-2024)
[6] http://www.emanuelprez.substack.com/p/why-is-the-left-always-left-out
Red Fire 