Let's support the Hollywood strike! Long live the American Revolution of the 21st Century!!

The last time writers and actors went on strike was in 1960 when the SAG, then the union for this industry, only had 13,000 members. But now, the current strike is the expression of the great economic, political and social changes that have shaken the United States for more than 15 years, more precisely since 2006 when the strategy of the Project for a New American Century (in English, PNAC) carried out by the Administration headed by President George Bush. The defeat of the PNAC opened up a revolutionary situation in the United States and the world characterized by a strong crisis of the capitalist economy, a huge crisis in the ruling classes, in the Pentagon, and in the bourgeois democratic regime and its traditional political parties.

The defeat of the PNAC: The IV American Revolution triumphs

After the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration launched a strategy that consisted of a global political, economic, and military counteroffensive whose motto was the "war against terror" and the defeat of the "axis of evil" . The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) strategy sought to overcome the serious crisis open to capitalism in the year 2000 and get the economy out of recession.

To achieve this goal, it established a major military operation and the development of a far-reaching and long-term war, with the aim of objective of putting a stop to the revolutionary processes in the Middle East, disciplining the workers and peoples of the world, and carrying out a burning of capital that would allow the crisis to be overcome.

It was impossible for the Bush Administration to carry this strategy forward with the opposition of the American people. That is why the Bush government took advantage of the impact produced by the terrorist attack of 9/11 to establish a profoundly undemocratic regime within the United States based on the Patriot Act, which sought to limit democratic freedoms. and expression of the workers and the people of the United States and silence any voice that wanted to oppose his strategy. The Patriot Act regime was a de facto constitutional reform, which placed the Executive Branch, the army and the security services at the center of the US political regime, attempting to erase with a stroke of the pen the historical democratic conquests of the american people, seeking to install the closest thing to a military dictatorship,

The PNAC was a strategy at the service of dealing a heavy blow to the North American people and the struggles of the peoples of the world who dared to challenge the power of the capitalist powers ipromoted from the US, but adopted by all the governments and capitalist states of the world in a political-military front that was articulated around NATO and the military Coalition that carried out the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the counteroffensive of the PNAC, and the NATO armies suffered a beating from the national liberation struggle of the people of Iraq, and the Middle East who carried out a system of urban guerrilla warfare, something similar to what Putin is facing now in his invasion of Ukraine, which is being defeated by the National Liberation War of the Ukrainian people, a just struggle that we support together with millions in the world.

The military defeat of NATO opened the Pentagon crisis, the confrontation of the high command with the government over the promotion of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld to mercenary armies like Blackwater, which was combined with a gigantic global mobilization of the masses. In the United States, vast sectors defended democratic rights, like many of the most oppressed sectors such as African-Americans against the horrific response of the Bush government to Hurricane Katrina, or the mobilization of Latinos on May 1, 2006. The defeat of the PNAC led to the crisis of the Bush government, and in fact the country was left in the hands of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton parliamentary commission that organized the electoral transition from the Bush government to the Obama government.

The defeat of the PNAC and the Patriot Act regime meant the triumph of the IV American Revolution. The 1st North American Revolution was the National independence achieved in 1783, while the 2nd was the victory of the Union in the Civil War of 1865. The 3rd North American Revolution was the Civil Rights Movement that defeated the "Jim Crow" regime of racial Segregation and combined with the mobilizations that together with the struggle of the Vietnamese people caused the imperialist defeat in Vietnam. The triumph of the IV American Revolution opened up the world revolutionary situation that we are experiencing, which began to trigger new movements that have completely changed the political, economic, and social reality of the United States.

With the triumph of the IV American Revolution, capitalism exploded

In the economic field, the Bush Administration had tried to relaunch the economy, copying Reagan with a bubble based on loans for mass consumption centered on housing loans. Millions contracted these loans attracted by the facilities, and thus the bubble of second category mortgages "sub-prime" grew, which began in 2002 as all the capitalist Global Corporations took on sub-prime debt, which promised to be a fabulous business that grew and grew without ceasing. The development of the wave of home purchases led to a jump in the construction industry, and with it, inflation skyrocketed. The prices of all construction materials rose, dragging all prices down with it.

To curb the wave of inflation that was unleashed, the Fed raised the interest rate, which in 3 years went from 1% to 5.75%, but this operation to raise interest rates made loans granted to very humble families more expensive and aggravated the debts and defaults. Investment Banks began to issue MBS (Mortgage Backed Securities) and CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligation) papers that served as insurance to cover possible defaults, which were traded throughout the world and became part of the coffers of the entire world financial system. Given the magnitude of the current credit bubble of gigantic dimensions, the G7 states called the Basel II agreement in 2004, seeking to overcome the limitations of Basel I, but those attempts to stop the bubble that had started were useless,

The entire world financial system full of MBS and CDOs exploded after the defeat in 2006 of the US military and the NATO Coalition. The political crisis of the Bush government was combined with the disaster caused by the sub-prime bubble with fifty bankrupt financial companies and millions of foreclosures. The political crisis of imperialism led to an Afro-American president coming to power for the first time, forming a government that was as "progressive" as possible with an Afro-American: Barak Obama. In this way, the imperialist circles tried to stop the revolutionary rise by making the masses believe that the oppressed had come to power.

The IV American Revolution Goes Global: Occupy Wall Street Is Born

The 2007/08 crisis of capitalism bankrupted Global Corporations and Wall Street. The bankruptcy was so serious that imperialism had to take measures of historical importance: The Bailouts. With the bailouts, world imperialism sought to rescue the bankers and owners of the Global Corporations. The Bush government began with the first bailouts that were later implemented by the Obama government and the governments of all the imperialist countries of the world, announced with great fanfare at the G20 Summit in London in 2009. But the initial expectation that the bailouts would stop the crisis vanished, soon house auctions skyrocketed all over the world, millions of jobs were lost, poverty, misery, and inequality increased,

After the withdrawal of the NATO armies that began in 2010, the Arab Spring broke out in the Middle East, a process that was part of a global revolutionary wave that included general strikes in Greece, the Indignados movement in Spain, the 11-M Movement in Chile, massive worker strikes in China centered in the Guangdong province. In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement broke out, the mass movement with its epicenter in the youth that exploded throughout the country, occupying squares in states, counties, and cities in the form of protest.

The effects of the Fourth American Revolution were more than visible since it was incredible and exciting to observe that 10 years before September 11, 2001, the southern borough of Manhattan in New York was a mountain of rubble and the Pentagon owned the situation by carrying out a campaign of terror against the population. But, while on September 17 2011, southern Manhattan was a breeding ground for hundreds of activists who organized and united through social networks to Occupy Wall Street.

The movement became global and in several countries, such as Hong Kong, the Occupy movement was repeated. The slogan "we are the 99 percent " represented an immense advance in the awareness of a section of the mass movement about the origin of the attacks that workers face by identifying the ruling class as the "1 percent". The Occupy movement was dominated by the theoretically inconsistent autonomist and anarchist ideology, whose petty-bourgeois, student immaturity could not develop the movement. Despite enjoying mass sympathy, the immaturity of the Occupy leadership facilitated the Obama Administration's crackdown, which wiped out Occupy encampments across the country, including the brutal overnight assault on Occupy Oakland on October 25, 2011.

OWS was defeated. But the emergence of OWS and its global impact made clear the new stage that was opening up in the United States and in the world: The triumph of the Fourth American Revolution had completely changed the situation in the United States and the world, and the revolutionary situation the country lives, and the world would give rise to another movement with a global impact just one year later.

The IV American Revolution incorporates a new battalion: Black Live Matters

On the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, United States, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American boy, went to a grocery store and was shot to death on his way home by George Zimmerman, coordinator neighborhood watch whose program was administered by the local police department. Zimmerman maintained that he killed the young man in self-defense, the Sanford Police released him, which sparked a wave of outrage worldwide, and shocked the country.

At that time, three African-American activists, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, launched the so-called Black Lives Matter (BLM in English, "Black lives matter") that quickly spread throughout the country and achieved mass mobilizations.

The explosion of mass sectors of the Afro-American American community dragged other mass sectors such as Latinos, immigrants, workers developing alliances with other oppressed sectors, what is called "allyship", or "innumerables allies" that tends to stand for unconditional support for blacks and other people of color or LGBTQ, mutual solidarity and frank dialogue. BLM began to resume the tradition of the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King. Inside Black movement different tendencies and ideologies began to emerge, both those reformist ones oriented to support the Democratic Party, as well as more radical and revolutionary ones. .

The enormous and powerful national and international mobilization that the IV American Revolution meant had given rise to the OWS, and the BLM, but by no means did the beginning of these new movements mean the end of racial attacks against African-Americans. On June 17, 2015, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina suffered a horrific attack when a young white man entered the church and began shooting at worshipers, killing 9 people, including Reverend and Senator Clementa. C. Pinckney. This attack shocked the country, due to the racist and supremacist character of its author who, while shooting, vociferated the arguments of the Klan and the Nazis, but also, because the attack was perpetrated against one of the symbols of the fight for civil rights.

BLM incorporated a new element that Occupy had not gone into in depth enough: Self-defense and armed self-organization to face the repression of the police and state forces. This same movement occurred in parallel with the self-defense against ISIS in Rojava, the self-defense in the mobilizations in Lebanon and Iraq, the rise of the First Line corps in the Revolution in Chile and in Colombia from 2019, which would deepen in 2021, as well as the formation of Partisan detachments in the Ukrainian National Liberation Revolution to fight against Putin's occupying armies. When images of supremacist Dylann Roof with Confederate flags became public, there was enormous pressure to remove the Confederate flag that hung in front of the Columbia capitol,

Three weeks later, both legislative chambers met and agreed to remove the flag that had flown for more than half a century, hoisted in 1961 by the state government. Opposition to Confederate monuments that are expressions of racism and fascism were falling, and the shock waves unleashed by Charleston reverberated across the country and spread to the world. In the United States, by 2015, the wave had eliminated more than 110 flags, statues, and collapsed banners of the Confederation, and these figures were extended as an expression of the new winds that are blowing in the United States after the triumph of the Fourth American Revolution, a process that spread to all the countries of the world where statues of racists, colonizers, and oppressors were torn down.

The irruption of the women's struggle: The "#Me Too" movement

In the heat of the development of the fourth world revolution of women around the world led by the Kurdish women of Rojava in the Middle East, the women of Argentina with the "Ni Una Menos" of 2015, the movements for legal abortion in Ireland, For abolitionism in Spain, an extraordinary movement arose in the United States in October 2017 to denounce sexual assault and sexual harassment, following accusations of sexual abuse against the American film producer and executive Harvey Weinstein.

The movement's objective was to support the complaint of women for receiving abuse and harassment, regardless of what year they occurred, popularizing the phrase #Me Too da by actress Alyssa Milano, who encouraged women to make their experiences public. , after which the movement "exploded"Worldwide. Meanwhile, in the United States, tens of thousands of people responded to Milano's tweet, including Patricia Arquette, Björk, Sheryl Crow, Rosario Dawson, Ellen DeGeneres, Lady Gaga, Monica Lewinsky, Emily Ratajkowski, Gabrielle Union, Reese Witherspoon, etc. The impact of the movement, in addition to Hollywood, was caused by the debate on sexual harassment and abuse that expanded to the music industry, science, academia, workplaces, politics, etc.

The movement spread to 85 countries, including India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom with variants of the phrase such as in France using " BalanceTonPorc " ("Report your pig"), in Italy, women posted stories of assault and harassment with the hashtag " #QuellaVoltaChe » («That time that»), in French-speaking areas of Canada with the hashtag « #MoiAussi ». In Israel, the Hebrew hashtag " גםאנחנ# " ("We too") trended on October 18, with a centerfold in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth, and the complaints reached the Parliament and the offices of the European Union in Brussels. Once again, a movement of oppressed sectors in the United States appeared as an expression of the triumph and development of the IV North American Revolution, impacting the world. When some states began to criminalize legal abortion, a huge process of mobilization across the country in defense of legal abortion rights resurfaced, a triumph that the women of the United States imposed decades ago and spread to the entire world.

The irruption of the working class: The phenomenon of the "New Unionism"

The outbreak of the show industry workers' strike is also an expression of another movement: that of the "New Unionism" . Just a few years ago, the United States began to experience the renaissance of the unionization phenomenon, and the emergence of thousands of new and young union leaders. Already the 2nd global revolutionary wave of 2019 had as its distinctive feature the emergence of the phenomenon of the "Yellow Vests" in France, and the return of the working class to the center of the world revolutionary rise.

To the extent that inflation skyrocketed in the United States and the world, protests were triggered by workers in food processing plants, drivers, carpenters, Hollywood technicians, university assistant professors and that third category illuminated by the health emergency that It was that of essential workers. The country had not experienced such a mobilization since 1970-1971 when there was a union wave, although it was more limited to blue-collar workers than industrial workers, and mostly unionized.

This "New Unionism" in the United States began in 2021 and had some of its most important milestones in the strikes against the employers of the multinational food company Kellogg's in October 2021, which lasted for more than two months in its four plants. Also the triumph of Amazon workers from Staten Island, Amazon's only fulfillment center in New York, which triggered a wave of new union activists across the country, taking on the multi-billion dollar industry of anti-union law firms. Now two large international unions such as the Teamsters, for truckers, and the United Auto Workers, both with a presence in the US and Canada, have approved massive organizing campaigns.Fed up with the company's failure to raise their wages, workers at a Buffalo Starbucks store decided to use the tactics contained in the handbook of the radical, now marginal, historic union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Thus, at the end of 2021, the Starbucks Workers United union was born and the first store of this company was unionized.

The photo of that victory is already historic: very young people, especially women, jumping for joy with the signs of their union, but this photo is also representative of what this "new unionism" is, promoted by a new generation that retake the banners of Black Lives Matter and feminism, a whole panorama shows that from the years 2021 and 2022 there was a resurgence of unionism in a country whose imperialist state, historically through both legal and illegal tactics, has tried to liquidate the unions. Statistics say that union membership in the United States has been on a downward trend since the days of President Ronald Reagan, but now the trend is turning, and reversing.

Union organizations present today rates of approval and support that only find precedents since 1965. This change in trend or this new union movement has been classified as "New Unionism" for a triple factor: it affects companies in which previously there had not been formed unions; the unions that are being built are new, without affiliation to the previous ones although influenced by them, and this new union movement is totally interconnected with the anti-capitalist movement, for Occupy, anti-racist for Black Lives Matter, pro-LGTBI and feminist for the movement # Me too .

The Joe Biden Administration and the Democratic Party want to pose as "progressive" and "pro-union", but this mask and deception collapsed when on December 1, 2021, Biden signed a reactionary legislative project through which unions and companies railway are forced to accept an agreement imposed by the imperialist government and the railway bosses. In this way, the Biden Administration showed its anti-worker policy and sought to restrict the right to strike of railway workers that would have actually caused a general strike in the country. Biden signed the legislative project showing that it is a capitalist-imperialist government that, faced with the threat of a general strike by the workers, defends the profits of the Corporations and employers, giving a message to the transportation workers and all the workers in the country.

At the same time, all this resurgence and progress of the union movement is a refutation of the theory of the " fragmentation" of the working class, and like all the movements that emerged in the United States as part of the Fourth American Revolution, it has expanded internationally conforming as a global movement. Women, Afro-Americans, queer and trans activists are at the forefront of this movement and pose: "...your identity is not detached from the class to which you belong...". The main difference with the "traditional" trade union movementWhat has occurred in the US since the end of World War II lies in the fact that this trade unionism has managed to be born and unite within it movements with a clear class perspective that combines with movements against oppression such as anti-racism or LGBTQ, something that before in the history of the country it had not happened.

The IV American Revolution produced a " global left turn " in the consciousness of the masses