Why I Joined the People’s Congress of Resistance (and why you should too)

JD Greenman
Jul 25, 2017 · 6 min read

The United States is at a crossroads. We have unceremoniously entered into the age which will undoubtedly bring on World War III. What is needed now is for working people to rise up and utilize their collective power to affect the changes necessary for the survival of the human race.

The People’s Congress of Resistance is a grassroots effort to organize all those disaffected by the ignorant rhetoric and stale bromides which pass for political stewardship in this day and age. The intended goal of the PCOR is the creation of a new Congress to represent the working people of the United States in order to address their grievances and the past malfeasance of the ruling class.

Join the first People’s Congress!
Sept. 16–17, Blackburn Center at Howard U., Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Congress does not represent the people who live and work in the United States. Given the threat posed by the Trump regime, the people must take matters into our own hands, together, and claim the power we already have. Help us build a new fighting Congress from the ground up of resisters and all the communities under attack!”

What follows is an account of the issues which have led me to join the People’s Congress of Resistance.

  1. The Two Party System is a failure:

A repeated complaint I hear among all working people is how the two party system has failed. Regardless of party affiliation, people reject the dominance of the entrenched Republican and Democratic establishment; however, they are reluctant to organize outside of them. These are the parties beholden to corporate interests which have hijacked our economy through the military-industrial complex, the war on drugs, and the process of de-industrialization and outsourcing.

Philosopher and Linguist Noam Chomsky plainly stating one of the many contradictions the American people live with.

These two groups have presided over the failure of the “American century” and reminded us of the hollowness of the Nationalist project. The Democrats and Republicans have laid bare the contradictions of the establishment’s relationship with capitalism. It is up to us to remake the system in a way that protects our interests as the working class and ends the exploitation of all working people.

2. The Right to a Livable Wage:

A graph illustrating the stagnation of wages

The term, “livable wage,” is misleading. Wages are a form of theft and piracy. The only “livable wage” is when working people own what they produce. What needs to happen now is a concerted effort of working people to band together, withhold their labor from the exploitative forces of capital, and demand what is their due. Even the “fairest” of wages is still exploitation. Work needs to be organized around need, not profit.

3. This audio clip of Michael Parenti during his lecture, “The Revolution that Feeds the Children.” (←Click to listen).

This particular clip was posted online by a comrade of mine in Canada. I saved it in my bookmarks and listen to it when I need to remind myself of the nature of our struggle. It speaks to the need for a change in the entire world’s social structure to benefit all people.

4. The disgusting inequality of wealth in America:

The rich prosper off of the labor of the workers. This graph speaks volumes. When the workers demand what is owed to them, then true democracy can flourish.

5. The failure of the United States Judicial System to seek justice in cases of Police Brutality and Abuse of Authority and the system of mass incarceration which has decimated working and poor communities (especially in communities of color).

Note the near stagnant number of prosecutions filed.
Note the disproportionate rates according to population.
The violent crime rate has not been this low since the early 1960s

6. The virulent hatred and contempt for working people which dominates U.S. politics:

There is no discussion of “ending poverty” in America, and the talk of “growing the middle-class” is all milquetoast nonsense which has gone nowhere. Capitalism is predicated upon the exploitation of working people. Plain and simple. Poor, working, middle class — we are all drops in the bucket compared to the disgusting wealth of any billionaire financier or the bloated budget of the U.S. military. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will ever have our interests at heart.

If working people would refuse their role as a subservient class to the interests of capital, then a society centered around the needs of the individual could truly flourish! With working people as the stewards of their own needs! With cooperation and mutual aide as the guiding force to a better tomorrow!

The rich need us more than we need them, and we should remind them of that. Together we are powerful.

7. The belief that poverty is an earned social status:

Perhaps nothing is so doggedly followed in America as the belief in work as an end in itself. We are raised to believe that work is a kind of penance levied against us by a social system designed to seek the best from us — that the exacting nature of the capitalist work day incentivizes us to do our best or penalize us for our failures. Working people all know, in their hearts, that this is a lie. The free market is a cold, impersonal system driven by profit. Hard work is simply not rewarded in our society.

The world has enough arable land and wealth that there should be no starvation. There is no feasible reason that people should be homeless in the modern age. There is no excuse for the police state or the war on drugs.

We have all the apparatus at our fingertips to remake the world right now, but until working people realize their power, we are stuck at the crossroads of indecision and certain doom.

Hold on to yer bootstraps, partner!

The phrase, “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” — a metaphor for the ability of “hard work” and “upward mobility” to propel an able person to the heights of capitalist luxury and happiness, was originally coined by turn-of-the-century socialists to describe the very impracticality of upward mobility in a society that necessitates the existence of a large displaced labor force of working poor. The modern usage of the term is ironically ignorant of these origins. Poverty is a systemic institution structurally designed as a scapegoat for the failures of capitalism.

Capitalism is a huge scam! Honk! Honk!

8. The use of private prisons and the “war on drugs” to decimate working class and impoverished communities (particularly communities of color):

The United States has the highest prison population per capita in the entire world.

9. The unending spiral of Imperialist wars and atrocities committed for the sake of American global dominance:

10. The disgusting nature of the ruling class’s public relations:

This was when Sean Spicer said Adolf Hitler “never gassed his own people” and then also made a Freudian slip where he said the US goal in Syria was to destabilize it.

11. The Relation of Capitalism to Racism (←Click here to watch)

JD Greenman

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This humble Greenman resides in the American Midwest and spends most of his time combating the existential dread this fills him with. No pasarán and no platform

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