Vol. 76/No. 48      December 31, 2012

Below is an excerpt from Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and president of Pathfinder Press. The title is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for December.

At the Venezuela Book Fair in 2007 and 2008 a wide-ranging debate on this topic took place. Talks by Waters at both occasions are presented in this booklet. The excerpt is from Nov. 14, 2008, when she spoke as part of a panel launching a Spanish-language edition of the book. Copyright © 2008 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
As we said last year, however, the question of whether socialist revolution is possible in the United States is no small matter. Its “answer, in practice, will ultimately determine the future of humanity—or more accurately, perhaps, whether there is a future for humanity.”

What most struck me in rereading last year’s presentation was the list of assumptions one would have to make to reach the conclusion that socialist revolution in the U.S. is not possible. …

“To reach that conclusion,” we said, “you would have to believe that there won’t again be economic, financial, or social crises on the order of those that marked the first half of the twentieth century. That the ruling families of the imperialist world and their economic wizards have found a way to ‘manage’ capitalism so as to preclude shattering financial crises that could lead to something akin to the Great Depression. …

“You would have to be convinced that competition among the imperialist rivals, as well as between them and the more economically advanced semicolonial powers, is diminishing and that their profit rates … are now going to begin to rise for several decades on an accelerated curve.” …

What seemingly started as a capitalist crisis centered in credit and banking has now been revealed to be something of a very different dimension. As the de facto bankruptcy of General Motors bears witness, the deepest contraction of industrial production and employment since the opening decades of the last century is accelerating dramatically. …

It is worth reminding ourselves that the Great Depression of the 1930s was not the consequence of the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent banking crises alone. Its roots are found in the violently intensifying competition among capitalist powers in the years leading up to World War I—for colonial possessions, access to markets and raw materials, and inexpensive sources of labor to exploit—and the economic and social breakdowns and financial catastrophe that accompanied that interimperialist slaughter and its aftermath. And it took the global carnage of the Second World War, including its massive physical destruction of capital across Europe and Asia from 1939 to 1945, to lay the basis for the exploiting classes to pull out of that crisis.

That is important. As Lenin stressed, there is no hopeless situation for capitalism. The two decades from 1930 to 1950 showed once again that the finance capitalists, if they are not stopped beforehand, can dig themselves out of any crisis—by inflicting enough bloody defeats on the working classes and destroying enough of the world’s existing industrial capacity.

The only question is the price the toilers will be made to pay.

The only solution is taking the power to inflict these horrors—state power—out of their hands, once and for all.

Is that possible? That is, after all, the question we posed a year ago. And we made the point that revolutionary struggles by the toilers are not only inevitable, they will be initiated at first not by us, “but forced upon us by the crisis-driven assaults of the propertied classes.”

The working class in massive numbers never enters on the road of revolutionary struggle lightly, or all at once. Workers sense the stakes, the sacrifices it will entail, the uncertainty. Our class in its majority exhausts other alternatives first, including alternatives to communist political leadership. …

Even before the new stage of the global retrenchment that is now accelerating, however, we have already seen, already been part of, the opening skirmishes of a fighting vanguard of the working class emerging in the United States. We saw this vanguard-in-becoming as millions of workers took to the streets of cities and towns across the country in 2006 and 2007 to demand the legalization of some 12 million immigrants whose documents the U.S. government does not recognize. They retook May Day as a fighting holiday of the working class. …

This is a working-class vanguard strengthened by its increasingly international character, by the traditions of struggle being added by workers from around the world to the longtime traditions of working-class battles in the United States itself. This is a working class that is slowly but surely learning in struggle the life-or-death necessity of fighting shoulder to shoulder—as well as how to do so. …

I want to close by emphasizing one point.

Our job today is above all a political one. While the class battles ahead of us are inevitable, their outcome is not. That depends on us. On our capacity to unflinchingly face the truth and speak with clarity to fellow combatants, to learn to rely on our own increasing class solidarity and unity in struggle. …

Working people the world over are in for decades of intertwined economic, military, social, and political crises, and accompanying explosive class battles. The period we are entering will be more akin to the years from the opening of the twentieth century through World War II than to anything any of us have lived through. The one thing we can be sure of is that our side, our class, will have more than one opportunity to alter the course of history in the only way we can—the way the workers and farmers of Cuba did it fifty years ago, and the way the working people of the tsarist empire did it four decades before them.  
 
 
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