From Discourse to Defiance

A Letter from the Editors

“The sun will rise in America”, Obama told the nation the day after the election. And so the Democratic party has, one by one, shown their collective necks and promised unity to the president-elect. Our political moment could not get much stranger.

This is not the first time the liberal establishment has greeted the fascist menace with open arms. The last rise of fascism was greeted with similar cowardice, the liberal ruling class chose then to defend its narrow interests (namely the interests of the capitalist class, many of them open Nazis) rather than the interests of the vulnerable population. Their ambivalence cost the world tens of millions of lives. We could not afford their cowardice then and we cannot afford it now.

We the workers, the students, the unemployed and underemployed, the dishwashers and teachers, the mothers and fathers. We the beating heart of society itself. We cannot and we will not allow fascism to grow again.

The corporate media has offered fairly pathetic resistance: either mocking the working class who voted for Trump or decided not to vote at all, or pointing to tired cold-war scapegoats (Russians, the Left, etc). They remain largely within their ideological constraints. Their “objectivity” amounts to a puppet show, where the debates are neutered and inconvenient facts are regularly discarded to shamelessly appeal to their Washington masters. They refuse to imagine a future free of fascism, of exploitation, of hunger, or of capitalism. It falls to us.

They believe as long as they don’t discuss it, it will never come to pass. And on this, they are correct, it us up to us to break through their wall of silence. We must imagine that future in conversation with our friends, our family, our peers, and our co-workers. We must sing the insurrection with our every breath. We must tell our story, our history, to learn and move forward with precision and accuracy against the forces that would supplant us. We must uplift the voices that the corporation would silence. According to former head of the federal reserve Alan Greenspan, the health of their economy (of capitalism) is based partly on the insecurity of the worker. Our insecurity arises from our isolation, and our isolation keeps us from debating and dissenting.

Our dreams and our interests have been obscured for too long behind media spin and capitalist greed. We need new platforms. A platform for the working people of Philadelphia to voice real concerns and propose our own solutions that the corporate news would not dare suggest. We have a new world in our hearts, and neither the condescension of liberals nor the violence of the fascist will stem the radical democracy that must gush forth against the fury of reaction.

In Solidarity.

Philadelphia Partisan Editorial Staff