Job crisis: cause and solution "I'm one of 600,000 Americans who lost their jobs this year," said a single Mom. "Potential employers tell me that so many people apply that they can get the skills they want without even considering everyone's application, including mine." This woman's story is becoming the norm. Further, the breadth and depth of the current round of layoffs is reaching into every sector of the economy - including Wall Street which is now called the "new" Rust Belt. What is even more alarming is the fact that today's job losses are, in the main, permanent. In August alone, the economy suffered a net loss of 84,000 jobs. Whole industries are going under, never to return again. What is the cause of the job crisis? Some say the layoffs are because the auto industry didn't turn to smaller vehicles soon enough. Others say the job loss is because of outsourcing and emerging markets like China. Or because of the bursting housing bubble and the sub-prime mortgage mess, which has now spread to the banking sector. All of these explanations are symptoms of the crisis. None are the cause. Like all crises of capitalism, the root cause of economic crisis is the inability of workers to buy back the goods they produce. But today's crisis is qualitatively different from all earlier crises. This one cannot be resolved within capitalism. Here's why. Capitalism is based on the buying and selling of labor power. The steady move to labor replacing electronic technology in the hands of the capitalist class is creating a permanent displacement of workers too poor to ever buy back the mountains of commodities being produced. While it is true that the government intervened in a way to help the workers during the Great Depression, that crisis took place before the shift to the current, new technological base of society. In the previous era, human labor was essential to industrial production. Today it is not. Thus we see that government intervention on the side of the giant corporations and for the purpose of stabilizing the system is seemingly limitless. Intervention on the side of workers is
non-existent. The capitalists will not provide for workers they cannot employ or exploit. Also, in the past, the periodic recessions have been temporarily solved with more borrowed money. But sooner or later the loans have to be paid. Unemployed and impoverished workers can't pay or buy. Without buyers, businesses can't sell what they make. Seeing this, bankers and other lenders are pulling back. Credit is drying up. The economy is headed from recession toward a full-scale depression. Even more dangerous -- history shows that capitalism, in periods such as these, will turn to military production, war and fascism in an effort to save the system. A Vision of a Different World Ultimately, there is only one way out of this: We, the people, must organize ourselves to fight for a new society where we use the marvelous technology at our disposal to provide for all. Such a society would guarantee that everyone has the necessities of life as a right. Imagine a world where money as a means of circulation of goods and services is a relic of the past -- where the economy is organized so that everyone gets what they need, and where everyone gives back to the society their talents and skills. It is a world worth fighting for. _http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2008.10/PT.2008.10.02.html_ (http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2008.10/PT.2008.10.02.html) This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
