Crises, Social Classes, and Revolution
By: Ken Barrios
Tags: Uprising, Capitalist Crisis, Social Class, Lenin, Revolution

Contrasting Crises: 2008 vs 2020

Crises do not automatically pull the lower classes into action. The level of political development of the masses (i.e. all social classes) determines if the lower classes mobilize and to what extent they are willing and able to assert their own demands.

In 2008, the world economy ran into the inherent capitalist contradiction of over-production of housing (and the corollary over-production of mortgages and hedge funds). But the masses were not ready to deal with this. It was a one-sided crisis in which the ruling class was able to impose austerity and the lower classes had neither the confidence nor organization to take any initiative.

It wasn’t until the Occupy movement of 2011 that any section of the lower classes responded to the crisis of 2008.

Contrast that with 2020. The masses now have the collective experience of:

disillusionment with Obama

Occupy & The Tea Party

#BlackLivesMatter & #MeToo

Charlottesville’s Unite the Right protest

The 2018 wave of teacher’s strikes

Trump and Sanders in 2016 (to name a few of the polarizing events between 2008 and 2020)

Now, the masses have nearly a decade of political experience and organization to build off of and challenge the ruling class for control.

The Lower Classes Take the Stage: 2020

In the context of 2020, the crisis opens up around Covid-19 and the deliberate inaction of the ruling class and their state. The ruling class could have rallied around shutting down the economy and providing a social safety net to guide society through the pandemic. But if they took these logical steps, they risked legitimizing the left-wing politics of socialism in a country that prides itself on its right-wing dedication to the free market.

Instead, the US ruling class vacillated by partially shutting down the economy while providing minimal financial aid. This vacillation caused the right-wing middle-classes to take the initiative. They mobilized around fully re-opening the economy (because the middle classes lack any imagination outside of the capitalist status quo). Suddenly, they were mobilizing armed seizures of state capitol buildings and armed re-openings of businesses, while also engaging in vigilante murders (like the murder of Ahmaud Arbery).

Feeling that the ruling class had lost control of the pandemic, they tried to assert their own right-wing, middle-class demands.

But then the capitalist state murdered George Floyd. The Black community entered the crisis of Covid-19 already hobbled by the housing crisis of 2008, to say nothing of the overarching history of slavery, Jim Crow, and The New Jim Crow. The eruption was tremendous and it tapped into the collective experience of Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizing. Taking a lead from BLM’s experience, the uprising pulled the left-wing masses into the streets to rally around anti-racism in general, and to defund police in particular.

Unlike the middle classes, the working class (centered in the Black community) was able to imagine an alternative to the status quo: a world where the police are defunded out of existence, and social welfare programs are expanded or funded into existence. The uprising around George Floyd is the largest uprising in US history and has proven the appeal of anti-racism and of these demands.

In other words, both the middle classes and working classes have put forward their solutions to the crisis that the ruling class has been unable to resolve.