“Chaos” in Congress…Cracks in the Wall
October 12, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On September 25, Republican congressman John Boehner announced he would resign as Speaker of the House of Representatives, and was quitting Congress. The conflict among the Republicans that drove him to resign—that mainstream news is calling “chaos” in Congress—is so intense that more than two weeks after Boehner announced his resignation, the Republicans have not been able to come up with a new Speaker of the House—a position second in line to the presidency after the vice president.
What is going on? John Boehner is a hard-core reactionary. He invokes racist code words about cutting “entitlement programs” to whip up a white-supremacist base. He invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu come to Congress and attack Obama and the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. Four years ago he nearly shut down the government demanding cuts in funding to Planned Parenthood, and he is “widely viewed as the most passionate opponent of abortion ever to wield the speaker’s gavel.” (New York Times).
But for hard-core Tea Party forces in the Republican Party, that’s nowhere near enough. They are on a mission and in a rush to impose drastic changes that would inflict vicious and extreme hardship on large sections of people. They are convinced this is necessary to maintain the U.S. as a capitalist-imperialist power. Other forces in the Republican Party fear that this Tea Party agenda would throw society into turmoil in ways that would endanger the whole setup.
On the “other side of the aisle”—the Democrats see a need for a certain level of social services, and a thin layer of “diversity” and “multi-culturalism” as necessary to maintain the system in a world going through huge economic, cultural, and demographic changes. But because white supremacy and women’s oppression are so tightly woven into this whole setup, they couldn’t do more than scratch the surface of those pillars of U.S. society, even if they wanted to. Look at what Obama has done: presiding over mass incarceration, police terror, rapidly shrinking access to abortion, unjust wars around the world, environmental devastation, and deportation of immigrants in record numbers.
All factions in this clash see a need to shore up the U.S. empire and the domestic social fabric with oppression and repression, even as they have serious differences over how to do that. The fact that their differences are so intense right now illustrates how sharply they are up against extreme problems for which they have no solutions—none that are in the interests of humanity.
Bob Avakian has made the point—speaking of the situation for the oppressed—that it can feel as if we’re locked in a huge prison yard surrounded by a huge steel wall that reaches up past our field of vision and seems incredibly thick, but that in fact, if you analyze things scientifically, there are cracks in that wall. And what is going on in Congress is one of those cracks.
There are no “good guys” in the nasty infighting in the halls of power. But these cracks in their walls of oppression can be worked on and taken advantage of, coming from interests of the seven billion people on this planet.
We have a strategy for revolution that DOES represent the interests of the seven billion, and that gives us a way to act on crises and conflicts within the powers-that-be to prepare the ground, prepare the people, and prepare the vanguard for revolution. Get into it, become a part of that.
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