After the disastrous fall of so-called ‘Russian communism’, America is searching for a credible enemy capable of catalysing the increasingly gloomy mood caused by the economic recession. But while the target now shifts to the ‘yellow peril’, now to the German syndrome (see the leaks regarding war scenarios drawn up by the Pentagon), America’s ‘dirty little secret,’ as the weekly magazine Time calls it, namely class struggle, is being openly evoked in the primary elections.

The messages and programmes of both Democratic and Republican candidates have a specific class appeal. But which classes are we talking about exactly? Which classes are mentioned by the grey Democrats and by Superbush, somewhat diminished by the war reports coming from the economic and social underground?

The great protagonist of the primaries is the middle class, which is losing ground in terms of numbers and income, courted by everyone because it is an unparalleled reservoir of votes. But the working class is also reappearing, identified with an expression that had been abandoned years ago in favour of the more neutral ‘working people’, because the former smacked too much of Marxism, and therefore communism, and therefore the evil empire, and therefore disloyalty toward everything America stands for, and therefore un-American.

This is reported from New York by the correspondent for Corriere della Sera.

But how is it that now, when communism is no longer around, they go and rediscover the plague? The fact is that ‘the people’, as one prefers to say in order to soften the overly crude language of classes, now recognises that ‘it is indeed true that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer’.

That is precisely what ‘the plague’ has contagiously revealed from the Communist Manifesto to the present day. Could it be that America, with its ‘affluent society’, its ‘big society’, its Reaganite hedonism, is rediscovering the class struggle?

Marxism not only never ruled it out, but prophetically affirmed it when, with the forced closure of the First International, it decided to symbolically transfer its headquarters to New York. The ‘American Dream’ has already lasted far too long, though periodically disturbed by terrible nightmares, such as the great crisis of 1929, the crises of 1941 and 1973, and the current crisis, recognised as the most severe in the last 40 years.

It is true, classes have always existed, but they appear all the more real when things go wrong. As we have always maintained, the cyclical economic crisis affects the working class, but it also becomes the slaughterhouse of the middle classes, whom ‘we sincerely despise’. They complain, in fact, that ‘Americans are not all equal and do not all have the same opportunities, that the government is not a neutral arbiter, and that those who have governed over the last 12 years have mainly served the interests of the rich’.

Serves them right, we say, because we have been saying it for at least 140 years; but as soon as the facts, the ‘shitty facts’ so dear to the pragmatism of the middle classes, lay it bare, then we never said it, or at best we were unbearable doom-mongers.

The middle classes, incapable of a homogeneous, class-based political orientation, precisely, oscillate between big Capital (represented by the party of the rich, the Protestants) and proletarian pressure, which unfortunately in America does not know the true class tradition, in the European sense of the word, due to the peculiar history of the American region. This does not detract from the fact that, despite the lack of a genuine communist tradition in America, the middle classes are the barometer of the crisis and are revealing it in all its drama. There is no reason to delude oneself that they are capable of facing the deep crisis of capital made in the USA; the two major parties, in their stuccoed play-acting, are exhausting all their feisty demagogy, producing the classic phenomena of right-wing polarisation, such as Ku Klux Klan-style neo-Nazism, and black reverends on the left. But the plague, with its contagion, does not look at skin colour, nor discriminate on the basis of sex or religion:

The ‘revolutionary’ fact in America consists in the fact that the rate of profit is pointing downwards and forces the country of big capital to leverage its military arrogance to compensate for its objective structural difficulties.

Under these conditions, the only chance of survival for many young people is petty crime, mostly drug dealing and petty theft. One in three black people will be imprisoned at least once in their lifetime, one in ten Latin Americans, and one in 17 white people. Over 2 million are incarcerated: no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its citizens, one and a half million more than China, which has a population five times larger (California Prison Focus). Certainly a cost-effective way to house and control the unemployed.

America thus positions itself up as the world’s policeman, threatening more or less openly ‘Germanic’ Europe and Japan with its endless economic miracle. The two former enemies, considered finished after the Second World War, are proving to be more vital than intact America, precisely according to the assessments of the class party and the Communist Revolution.

May the contagion spread until it crosses the Atlantic barrier, until it reunites with the great European communist tradition, for the unity of the working class across all continents.