Vol. 79/No. 26      July 27, 2015

The excerpt below is from Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for July. Author Mary-Alice Waters is a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and president of Pathfinder Press. The selection is from her presentation at the 2007 Venezuela International Book Fair in Caracas. Copyright © 2008 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
I am speaking here today as one of a small minority, including among those who call themselves leftists, or revolutionaries, a minority that says without hesitation or qualification: Yes, revolution is possible in the United States. Socialist revolution. To put it in class terms, a proletarian revolution — the broadest, most inclusive social upheaval of the oppressed and exploited imaginable, and the reorganization of society in their interests.

As it deepens, that mass revolutionary struggle will win the support of the majority of the working class, small farmers, and other exploited producers and their powerful allies among oppressed nationalities, women, and others. It will be led by an increasingly class-conscious, tested, and expanding political vanguard of the working class.

In the third American revolution, workers who are African-American will be a disproportionately large component of the leadership.

That revolutionary struggle will take political and military power from the class that today holds it, mobilizing the strength and solidarity — the humanity — of working people in the United States on the side of the oppressed and exploited worldwide.

It will be a struggle that transforms the men and women who carry it forward as they fight to transform the twisted social relations inherited from the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism — relations that corrode human solidarity and coarsen us all.

What’s more, revolutionary struggle by the toilers along the path I just described is inevitable. It will be initiated at first not by the toilers, but forced upon us by the crisis-driven assaults of the propertied classes. And our struggles will be intertwined, as always, with the resistance and struggles of other oppressed and exploited producers around the globe.

What is not inevitable, however, is the outcome of these coming revolutionary struggles. That is where political clarity, organization, discipline, and the caliber of proletarian leadership become decisive. That is why what we do now, while there is still time to prepare — what kind of nucleus of what kind of revolutionary organization we build today — weighs so heavily.

I wanted to assert this at the start so our discussion here at this event can share a common vocabulary. This is the meaningful class content I give the oft-abused word “revolution.”…

Today, above all I want to address my remarks, with all due respect, to those who doubt that socialist revolution in the United States is possible — to those who believe, or fear, that U.S. imperialism is too powerful, and that revolution has become at best a utopian dream.

To those who harbor such doubts, I will pose a question:

What assumptions about the future, explicit or implicit, could justify such a conclusion? What would the future have to look like?

I hope others here will address this as well. But I would like to give my answer.

To reach that conclusion, you would have to believe that the coming decades are going to look more or less like those we knew for nearly half a century following World War II.

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; to growing assaults on the economic, social, and political rights of the toilers; to spreading imperialist war; to the rise of mass fascist movements in the streets. That such a crisis of the capitalist system would no longer be met by working-class resistance like the mass social movement that exploded in the United States in the 1930s and built the industrial unions.

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, which have been on a long downward trend since the mid-1970s, are now going to begin to rise for several decades on an accelerated curve.

You would have to believe that such a turnaround in their accumulation of capital can be accomplished without the massive destruction of productive capacity — human and physical — wrought by decades of war, such as those that culminated in the interimperialist slaughter of World War II. That is what was necessary for the capitalist rulers to get out of the last great depression.

I believe the evidence is overwhelming that the future we face is the opposite. …

What is coming are years that will bring increasingly conscious and organized resistance by a growing vanguard of working people pushed to the wall by the bosses’ drive to cut wages and increase what they call productivity.

What is coming are years punctuated by street battles with ultrarightist movements aimed against fighting union militants, revolutionary socialists, Blacks, immigrants, Jews, and others — in even the most “stable” of bourgeois democracies.

What is coming are years of economic, social, and political crises and intensifying class struggle that will end in World War III, inevitably, if the only class that is capable of doing so, the working class, fails to take state power — and thus the power to wage war — out of the hands of the imperialist rulers.  
 
 
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