January 7, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

For 250 years, the U.S. Congress has overseen and carried out grinding exploitation, wars of empire (including the seizure of a huge section of Mexico, as well as Puerto Rico), genocidal assaults on Native Americans and wholesale theft of their lands, the enslavement for generations of African and then African-American people, then segregation (enforced both legally and by lynch mobs) followed by mass incarceration of those same people, the legal restriction of the rights of women and gay people (including the suppression of birth control and the right to abortion for centuries, both of which are still under attack, and until relatively recently, the legalization of “marital rape”), the super-exploitation, demonization, and persecution of immigrants... crime after crime after crime. (See the accompanying graphic for just the most recent crimes carried out by the Democrats.)

But wait, we’re told. Now there’s a few more women and people of color who have gotten in on it, so it’s gonna be a whole different thing. Don’t worry, says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the poster-person for all this—“the Democratic Party won’t change me, I’ll change it.”

Right.

If Ocasio-Cortez told you that she was becoming a low-level gang boss in the cartels in order to end dope-dealing, or if one of these newly minted male Democratic reformers told you he was becoming a priest in order to end the patriarchal sexual abuse and misogyny that permeates the Catholic Church, what would you say?

Listen: institutions have a basic character and function independent of you and whatever you tell yourself when you join up with them. The Congress, by definition and self-description, is a vehicle to extend and expand “American interests”—which in a capitalist system can ONLY mean the interests of the capitalist-imperialists in extending and expanding their empire. That’s what it actually means when you say that something is a “system”! The crimes in the accompanying article are not bugs, they are features. That is, they are not weird anomalies that somehow happened, but how the shit works and is supposed to work.

And if any of these “fresh faces” don’t already know that, they’ll soon find out.

The important question is, when will YOU?