I Don't Know What to Title This.

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

9-11-26

 

It's nothing I haven't stated before. I was just thinking about childcare and the stress this imposes on young married couples. It's expensive, it's a business like health care in general. But the state could provide creche's every few blocks. The state can provide communal laundries communal kitchens whatever, organized and run by working people in those communities. Control of the state means real power, that is why the Chinese are out competing and undermining US hegemony on the global stage. 

 

This does not mean I support the Chinese misnamed Communist Party of the bureaucracy there. It's important to understand the role of the state though. I personally believe that there will be some major battles ahead as the Chinese working class is forced to control the bureaucracy. 

 

We live in a bourgeois democracy. A capitalist democracy in other words. But we need to remind ourselves that in Athenian Democracy that the western world claims is its origins, the slaves had no right to vote. In a capitalist democracy we get to vote for one of the candidates of the class that rules (capitalists) every four years. They didn't want to give us that right, we took it. I think the indigenous people in the US never won that right until the 1940's. 

 

In a workers' democracy, the class that rules would be the formerly oppressed class in the old system, the working class would be the ruling class, we would have the access to all that social power that a state has. I understand the anarchists disagree with this view but I am not an anarchist, I accept Marx's view of the state as clarified by Lenin after the 1917 revolution. I am not a Leninist either. I am a worker first and foremost; this is a good start for any would be revolutionary. 

 

Marx, like the anarchists saw a future society where there was no oppressive organ like the state. But the state cannot be ignored in the struggle for this future and it has to be conquered by the working class and used to build a genuine communist society in which there is no class antagonism. In that effort working class people will be forced to battle with the remnants of the oppressive system from which we freed ourselves and we cannot do that without organising ourselves as the class with state power. 

 

I am going to end it there because I don't intend to continue in the debate between the withering away of the state under workers' control according to Marx and the anarchist view (correct me if I'm wrong my anarchist comrades) that the state itself is at the root of the problem no matter which class controls it. See why I couldn't decide on a title. I think it’s the beer.