John Fisher
January 7, 2002
Recently an American by the name of John Walker was found in the ranks of the Taliban. A young boy, Charles Bishop, also recently flew a small plane into a tall Florida office building. In his pocket was found a hand written note expressing support for bin Laden. To many these occurrences are shocking, to Marxists they are no surprise. Global Capitalism is in the epoch of it's senile decay. Not even suburban America is safe from the cancer of this rotten system.
Unknowingly the two mentioned individuals have expressed discontent not just with American culture, but with capitalism as a whole. They have rejected American society, but have embraced reactionary religious fanaticism. Without a clear alternative to the problems and filth capitalism has created they have turned into the shock troops of reaction. Without a mass Marxist party offering clear socialist alternatives to capitalism people will turn to all sorts of strange actions and ideas for answers.
Why though is the rottenness of capitalism popping up so close to home? Today's suburban kids have "everything they need, they go to school, they have their TVs, their video games, their music."
Young Americans and Western Europeans are angry. But again, why? The apologists of capital say, "what is wrong with these kids, they have everything they want!" They're angry because the system of capitalism offers them no real future. On the news they see wars raging in ex-colonial nations thanks to the consequences of imperialism. In their own country they see mass violence, such as school shootings (yet another product of the American culture created by a decaying capitalism). In their own homes they see their parents at each other's throats over money, it is no wonder violence and anger is all the "rage" in the West among the youth. Multiply this scenario by millions with thousands of different variations and it is no surprise the cancer of capitalism is popping up in the intestines of the beast itself.
How does this end? How does the anger and cynicism of the youth end? It will end along with the rotten system which created it - capitalism. The answer is not the injection of hypocritical religious morals into the schools but the conscious revolutionary reconstruction of society along socialist lines.
How will this happen though? Not through religious fundamentalism, not through any sort of reforms even. It will end through the building of a mass party of the proletariat. Only through the conscious efforts of the working class guided by an aware Marxist leadership will the socialist reconstruction of society be possible and with that the movement forward of humanity as a whole.