Why aren't Americans fighting back?

This article by  E. Douglas Kihn of the Truthout web-site is very instructive and is well worth reading in full. Basically it argues that the American worker lacks class consciousness and requires to acquire an understanding of themselves and their enemy, the capitalist class, quoting Sūn Zǐ, the 6th century BCE Chinese general, military strategist, and author of The Art of War, "If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles . . . if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle."

In the class war as in all struggles “self-knowledge and knowledge of the enemy confer on the fighter the outlines of a winning strategy, based on the best utilization of available weapons of offense and defense.”

The majority of Americans are, unknowingly,  members of the working class. The article correctly presents a two-class analysis of society. “Class is a reflection of a person's relationship to the means of production of wealth. The majority of Americans have to work for a living to survive, in workplaces devoid of democratic rights. Workers are neither middle class nor lower class, no matter how much or how little we earn, no matter if we work with our minds or muscles, in factories, offices, transportation companies, schools, hospitals, or retail outlets. We are working class"

The capitalist class, meantime,  already knows who they are and what they are fighting for, and they are well aware of who their enemy is. That's why they are presently winning the fights.

When workers do fightback it is in separate struggles, not in solidarity and not in unison. The article refers to two events far apart in history but with similarities, the plebian rebellion against the Roman patrician class and Poland’s Solidarnosc of the 1980s. In the case of the Roman plebs and Polish workers, class is what unites the toiling majority and solidarity is our most potent weapon.

The article is critical of recent panaceas of worker-owned enterprises recently presented by “liberal” economists and explains why this strategy is doomed to failure as a cure-all. The article is also critical of those, particularly in the labor unions and the Greens, of advocating reformism, of improving capitalism and moving away from any real challenge to the bosses' profits or their for-profit structure.

The article also exposes the manner in which nationalism, sexism, racism, and xenophobia serve the interests of the ruling class in a big way, preventing the formation of solidarity, the most potent weapon in the working class arsenal and the reason why "divide and conquer" is the strategy of ruling minorities. “The nation-state is purely an invention of 15/16th century capitalism, used by the investor class to protect their profit-making abilities. The tribes, city-states, and regional states that preceded the nation-state eventually gave way to the approximately 195 national governments that currently keep humanity divided against itself........Working people will learn to avoid using the first-person plural pronouns of "we," "us," and "our" when referring to the capitalist government and military, (we invaded Iraq, we must fix our economy, they hate us for our freedoms, and other inanities), and instead use these pronouns when referring to our class and our human species....”

The article describes how 40 percent of the American electorate that typically isn't motivated to vote has, in some sense, a higher political consciousness than the 60 percent who vote time and again for the continuance of class society, because the 40 percent know consciously or unconsciously that these elections are not going to improve their lives in any meaningful way. Only when a mass Labor Party enters the arena will bourgeois elections take on real significance.

This article holds many  positions in common with  the World Socialist Movement, we can only hope that their vision of a mass Labor Party reflects the same democratic non-reformist mass socialist party aspired to by ourselves.

SOYMB recommends reading whole article.