This article is the editorial for issue #7 of Communist Revolution. Subscribe here!
“May you live in interesting times”: this saying, supposedly taken from an ancient Chinese curse, sums up our epoch. Anyone who imagined they could live a simple, quiet life is in for a disappointment.
The pace of history is accelerating. Events are rushing forward and crashing into each other like a highway pileup.
The ruling class in the West is going through a historic crisis of its parties and institutions. The elections taking place in a record number of countries this year are acting as a catalyst for a political crisis that has been brewing for a long time—the political expression of capitalism’s existential crisis.
In the U.K., the Conservative Party, that pillar of the capitalist system since 1834, has suffered its worst defeat ever.
In France, the far right came within a hair’s breadth of a parliamentary majority, while the legislature is in complete deadlock, with no solution in sight.
In the United States, events have taken a dramatic turn with the assassination attempt on Trump. His victory on Nov. 4 is now virtually assured. The ruling class is in a panic. Biden was forced to step down after his disastrous debate performance. The Democrats are now reluctantly rallying behind Kamala Harris, but no one seems confident about her as a candidate.
Trump’s rhetoric about being the target of the “deep state” appears vindicated: that he is the scourge of the established order, against whom the enemies of the American people are ready to do anything, from prosecution to attempted assassination. The far right will be strengthened and will feel justified in going on the offensive.
Trump in power will carry out serious attacks on workers, women and minorities, and the labor movement will have a duty to mobilize massively to block them. But that’s not what scares the ruling class.
The danger for them is that Trump’s presidency will massively accelerate the radicalization of the American masses. He is completely unpredictable and shows no regard for any of the traditional institutions of the bourgeois state, and workers will stop respecting them on a mass scale too. He’s an arsonist throwing fuel on the fire of revolution.
Canada is not isolated from this radicalization process. The border between the two countries is extremely porous.
While the crisis is not as advanced in Canada, there’s no shortage of combustible material.
The housing crisis in particular weighs heavily on the conscience of millions of working class families. No wonder Pierre Poilievre, this cheap Canadian copy of Trump, is hammering away at this issue. But neither his idiotic libertarian proposals nor the Liberal half-baked measures will solve the crisis. No one in Canada’s ruling class really wants to tackle it.
The slaughter in Palestine, too, which continues with appalling persistence, is provoking a boiling anger in millions of young people and workers. They see clearly the complicity of our ruling class and its parties, who continue to support Israel, and who repress those who dare to oppose this monumental crime.
The ruling class got what they wanted, with the end of the encampment movement. While several encampments chose to clear out on their own, the encampments were dealt the final blow with a scandalous police and private security crackdown at McGill University, where it all started. If we are to learn anything from this phase of the struggle, it is the need for a genuine mass movement, and not small actions by tiny cliques of activists.
Now, the next stage of the Palestine movement is clear: this fall, a student strike against the genocide must be organized. This is what communists advocate for.
Genocide, the rise of the far right, “political violence”, repression, living conditions that continue to decline: faced with these symptoms of a system on a downward spiral, the left sinks into demoralization.
The only way to maintain one’s head is to see the other side of the coin: the deep crisis in society also presents immense opportunities for revolutionaries. The ruling class is struggling to defend the legitimacy of its system. These developments are shattering the illusions of millions of people in the institutions of capitalism.
If more and more people are turning to demagogues, it’s because they know the situation can’t go on like this. Defenders of the status quo look even crazier than Trump.
What’s missing is for communists to organize and show the way out of this rotting system. We need to explain relentlessly that the root cause of people’s problems lies in the crisis of capitalism.
To paraphrase Marx, beneath the surface, in the consciousness of millions, the old mole of revolution is digging, digging, digging, undermining the ideological foundations of the system. And history is accelerating. We need to have a sense of urgency. Revolutions happen with as much certainty as the seasons. But it’s up to us to be ready to lead the next one to victory.
