Sunday, May 29, 2016

Fighting Slogans For Today's Militants- Bread, Land and Peace!

Commentary

Has Markin gone senile on us with the headline slogans? Has Markin been in a time warp and gone back to the spring and summer of 1917 in Russia to appropriate the day-to-day slogans that the Bolsheviks grafted onto their program and which led to their success in the October revolution? No, Markin is not senile nor has he gone back in a time machine to the glory days of 1917. Markin has just taken a glance at some recent daily headlines and ‘creatively’ encapsulated those stories. Hear me out.

Bread- In Russia in 1917 the initial spark for the February revolution that overthrew the Czar were the demonstrations of working women, housewives and soldiers’ wives for bread. Literally. A look, on any given day, today at the worldwide rise in prices of basic foodstuffs due to a myriad of factors brings that old fight against starvation in stark relief. Literally. Add to that the lunatic increase in the price of fossil fuels and other forms of energy needed to produce the world’s goods and the situation cries out today for a fundamental change in the way the world’s finite resources are apportioned. Conclusion: Fighting propaganda centered on the need for a rationalization of the world economy through centralized planning under workers control is on the order of the day.

Land- In Russia in 1917 the peasants cried out for resolution of their land hunger after centuries of near starvation tilling of their tiny plots and their serf-like subservience to the landed interests. Today that land hunger has taken a different form, at least in America- ownership of single family homes- and the current housing crisis with its foreclosures and declines of prices in the housing market have placed working people up against the wall. Whether working people were right or wrong in their desire for private home ownership they are the ones taking it in the neck today. Conclusion: An immediate moratorium on foreclosures and other financial remedies is called for. Again, fighting propaganda on the question of rationalization of the housing market under the planning principal through workers councils is called for.

Peace- In Russia in 1917 the slaughter of World War I had finally hit home and the peasant-based army was falling apart under the direct military thrust of German imperialism, the inane goading of Western imperialism and the sheer madness of continuing the war by a broken army. Today Iraq and Afghanistan, to speak nothing of a plethora of other localized wars and disputes like the Palestinian question, have made the world an extremely dangerous place where war-like conditions can set off an explosion in an instant. Conclusion: Short and sweet- it is time to make class war on the warmongers, and in the first instance, the American military goliath. The beginning of wisdom for today’s propaganda fight is the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all American/ Allied troops and their mercenaries from Iraq and Afghanistan!

These three slogans point to the more general conclusion implicit in their exposition. All of this is a pipe dream or a Markin delusion if the fight does not include the fight for an independent working class party of our own that fights for a workers government so we can fight like hell to turn things around. In short, and here is where the 1917 analogy really comes into focus- we have to start talking Russian, circa 1917, to the bosses, pronto.

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