Social Unrest

As we sail into the present economic mess, the one storm that can bring dramatic change is social unrest. We are beginning to see it in actions like the community organization Acorn deciding to bar the door to home evictors. That’s reminiscent for me of the the YCL, the “Young Communist League,” in the Bronx during the thirties returning evicted tenants to their homes. When the Marshals removed the tenants furniture to the street, a well disciplined YCL Flying Squad would put the furniture back in the apartment. Thousands of World War One veterans marched on Washington for their promised bonuses. Workers were joining unions by the thousands to protect their jobs. It was these actions that caused the powers that be or the “ruling class” as we called them to begin to think about how to cool the unrest. Hence the New Deal. (1)

Back then there was a powerful organized left that could give leadership and direction to the unrest, as the YCL did in the Bronx. At the same time we would agitate for a new socialist society. The presence of the Soviet Union back then also had a sobering impact on how the bourgeoisie thought of what social unrest might bring about. The Soviet Union and its “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was the greatest disaster for the left. For in fact it never was a truly democratic socialist society. But still people confused it with what a true socialist society might look like. No matter, the ruling capitalist class still worries about social unrest because it destabilizes the capitalist system.

If the economy continues to go into the dumps, social unrest will grow. I believe that our national propensity for the right of the individual to defend their homes will take on some serious consequences. I am awaiting the day when a group of NRA folks decide to defend their homes by sitting on their porches, shot guns in hand, to defy the Sheriff from seizing it. Maybe you can sense the glint in this old geezers eye. Man would I love to organize those folks. Montana or Missouri would be my first places of choice. I can see the headlines, “People Take Guns to Defend Their Homes.”

I have a major concern that all that anger and rage against Wall Street is not being organized into meaningful objectives for change. I am not referring to Obama’s change. That mostly has to do with style, like reaching across the isle. (Yee Gods, how that went bust.) I am talking substantive change, for example a rule such as the State that is bailing out the banks gets to control them. If we were talking business wouldn’t we insist on that? We put up the money, so don’t we get something in return? I’m afraid Obama does not have the stomach for that. The least he needs to do is like the way the government bailed out the S&L banks--take them over, stabilize them, and give them back. In the present mess the Government needs to take over the failing banks in order to reorganize them and get them functioning again. And it needs to decide that some of them are not worth saving.

In my YCL days I spent a lot of time studying how capitalism works. As a result I still have some ideas why the present plan is not working. In my next blog I am going to dive into those waters and I am certain I won’t sound like the Sunday morning television pundits. (Pssst, they never had to study how the capitalist system works.)

Thanks Kate. N.H.W.Y.