US ruling class in a crisis as cyber warfare heats up.

Stein and the GP should be commended for this

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Member Green Party USA

“By all appearances, Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the ‘benevolent superpower”. They will tell you that open mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of ‘don’t be evil.’ They believe that they are doing good and that is the problem.”  Julian Assange When Google Met Wikileaks P35

I see that "Guccifer 2.0" the renowned hacker, or hackers has released the personal information of 200 Congressional Democrats.

What we are witnessing here is a cyber war. The cyber warriors are at war with the US ruling class, creating havoc among the worlds’ most ruthless and violent ruling clique.  Not only are the two parties of US capitalism in disarray and in danger of splitting, they are fielding to the American electorate the two most hated candidates in US history. They are in extreme political crisis and the techies are a formidable opponent.

It’s not that I support publicizing the details of a person’s private life but we are talking here about the people responsible for the death of millions of people through their predatory wars in defense of US corporations and profits. People whose whole existence is based on lies and deceit. The people responsible for designing and implementing policies that leave millions of their own citizens homeless, without health care, work, and a secure future.

We have a situation where right wing Republicans, and the misogynists among them are supporting the dreaded Hillary Clinton, the Democrat.  As we say here in the US, “You can’t make this shit up”. But it also shows that the ruling class is united as a class. It’s useful to have two parties, even if they’re both in crisis.

Wikileaks, the news agency headed by Julian Assange who is holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for fear of being extradited to the US where public figures have called for his murder, has already released some 20,000 e mails related to Clinton and the DNC and says there are more to come.  The authors on this blog have said that it cannot be ruled out that the US bourgeois may not be able to get their first woman president if further damage comes to light. It could not be ruled out that another terrorist attack might occur in the US to take our minds off the political crisis and have us focus on foreigners. Or they might have to find another candidate. Who can tell these days?

I am not prone to conspiracies as a means of explaining events, the bourgeois still rule,  but conspiracies do occur. In a war people die, and we cannot rule out that the recent string of deaths, people associated with or suspected of being journalists or lawyers friendly to Wikileaks, Internet freedom and transparency in media, is just a coincidence.  One only has to listen to the vitriol aimed at Assange in the mass media. The ruling class is in a political crisis and they will kill to defend their interests. Even the Green Party and its presidential Candidate and Vice Presidential candidate are being targeted; if the GPUSA can take advantage of this situation, a task made harder by the fact that it has not really acted like a real party and is not prepared to govern in many ways, the working class can make gains as well.  But there is real fear among the 1% and a scared animal is a dangerous one. The GP candidates can expect more slander in the media.

It might not be the correct term but the cyber warriors are proving to be a formidable opponent for the cabal that runs US society. Assange talks of the cyber warriors in his book, When Google Met Wikileaks. We don’t read much about it in the 1%’s media but there has been an ongoing war against those heroic tech savvy types who are fighting for Internet freedom and right of the population to know.  The young guy Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist and computer whiz who committed suicide, was facing 35 years for downloading academic papers with the intent of distributing them to the public. He had been caught distributing documents before for free.

Assange talks of Gottfried Svarholm, another Internet activist facing trial and hounded by the US as Assange himself is. Svarthholm also collaborated with Wikileaks on the video, Collateral Murder, the video Chelsea Manning has been accused of sending to Wikileaks. Manning is also serving 35 years. Phil Zimmerman is another as well as Edward Snowden and Raja Petra.

Wikileaks and these cyber warriors are heroic figures and workers owe them a debt of gratitude as I have said many times before. They are not socialists, Assange is not a socialist as far as I know and clearly does not see the working class as the force that can change society. And why would he? The US working class is not on the scene in a major way here. There are scattered and isolated groupings and struggles against various market driven crises from environmental degradation (fracking, Flint) to BLM and the protests against mass incarceration and other issues. But in the main the US working class has yet to enter the scene in a major way. This too will change as the capitalist offensive at home intensifies.

US capitalism is driven by the laws of the market to attack its own working class further. It has to maintain its global dominance, bribe its despotic gangster friends, bomb its enemies, those who want a larger share of the loot than Washington is prepared to give.   And as Assange points out in his book, its partners in this are the new tech bourgeois, the Eric Schmidt’s and others.

Wikileaks has pulled the veil from the face of the ruling clique, their phony diplomacy and murderous political scheming all in the interests of profits and the rule of capital and the market. It is this activity that gives birth to terrorism and in its most barbaric form, groups like ISIS. There is without doubt a cyber war going on and it’s a serious fight. The hackers won’t go away.

As we have pointed out before on this blog, the socialist left has underestimated the importance of these forces that are fighting the unelected clique that governs society. The trade union leadership on the other hand are criminal in their cowardly absence from this fight. As connected to technology as the Snowdens, Assanges, and Anonymous and these cyber warriors are, this doesn’t mean their understanding of society and how capitalism arose and what forces will bring its demise is as clearly thought out. The Assanges and Snowdens of the world, and whoever or whatever "Guccifer 2.0" is, can be powerful allies of the working class in the class war, a war not of our choosing or of our creation, but a natural struggle between the producers of wealth in society and those who appropriate that wealth for their own ends.

We have the numbers, we have the experience, we have the brains and we have the technology. What we lack is the leadership. That is what we must build and Wikileaks and those courageous tech warriors can help us; we are natural allies.  The future of life on earth depends on it.

“The issue of preserving politically salient intellectual content while it is under attack is central to what Wikileaks does, because that’s what we’re after. We’re after those bits* that people are trying to suppress because we suspect, usually rightly, they they’re expending economic work on suppressing those bits because they perceive those bits are going to induce some change.” When Google Met Wikileaks P. 83

*Information