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Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 22, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- A UNITED FIGHT-BACK OF WORKERS AND
OPPRESSED:
THE ONLY SURE-FIRE SOLUTION TO ECONOMIC
CRISIS
By Fred Goldstein
The economic news coming out of the big-business
media is
full of trepidation about the prospects for another downturn in the U.S. economy, which could in turn tip worldwide capitalist stagnation into a global recession, if not depression. To be sure, the current reports coming from the
U.S.
capitalist government's economic reporting agencies run from negative to ambiguous. But Marxists know that the bosses themselves do not know, and cannot know precisely at any given time, whether or not their own economy is headed for a major downturn or not. They spend enormous sums of money collecting and
analyzing
economic data. Yet it is in the nature of the profit system of capitalist exploitation, and its modern form, imperialism, that they cannot know about a recession until after the fact. That is because capitalism is driven by groups of
billionaires who own the massive means of production, who meet behind closed doors, in secret from each other and from the masses of the world, to hatch their plans for production, based on each grouping's intent to maximize future profit. Furthermore, even as they see the signs of a
downturn, with
government intervention they may be able to forestall it-- but they cannot prevent it. RECESSION OR SLOW GROWTH--
WORKERS ARE HURTING
Whatever the immediate future holds, the present
economic
situation adds up to increasing hardships on the working class. This poses the urgent need to prepare and organize a class-wide fight back. On Aug.11, US Airways announced its intention to
file for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The sixth-biggest airline in the country has negotiated concessionary agreements with the unions under the shadow of preparing for this bankruptcy. Now it is heading toward massive layoffs under its so-called reorganization for "profitability." Two days later American Airlines announced layoffs
of 7,000
workers as part of its reorganization for profitability, after showing huge losses. Six airlines have filed for bankruptcy and protection, laying off close to 100,000 workers, in the past year. This problem preceded Sept. 11. The reason is a
decline in
profits due to over-capacity: too many seats available for the market. Louis Uchitelle wrote in the Aug. 11 New York Times
that the
Commerce Department has issued new figures on wages and salaries indicating overall "stagnation" and a downturn for the workers. The stagnation, as he calls it, "results not only from meager wages, but also from cutbacks in hours, the disappearance of nearly 1.7 million jobs since March 2001 and the rise in the unemployment rate, which now stands at 5.9 percent." In the year after the fourth quarter of 2000, "$94
billion
in pay disappeared, with $9 billion recovered in a mild rebound so far," Uchitelle continued. By the numbers, this means that the working class
as a whole
lost $85 billion in pay in the last year and a half. And during the so-called recovery, the bosses are trying to protect their profits by holding wages and hours down, shifting health-care costs to the workers, and layoffs. On the question of health care, an area in which
the profit
system vitally affects the workers and their families, the consumer advocacy group Families USA estimated that in the last year more than 2 million families lost their health insurance, bringing the number to 41 million. (New York Times, Aug. 12) And those who still have health insurance faced
11-percent
rate increases last year, much of which was passed on to the workers by the bosses. Workers face a 13-percent increase this year. This intolerable burden loaded on the workers by
the profit-
gouging health-insurance giants and bosses who won't pay is one of the most vicious aspects of the modern, high-tech economy. With all its modern drugs, medical instruments and diagnostic methods, health care is run on a for-profit basis, only used to treat those who can pay or have insurance. Hunger is another indicator of the growing poverty
caused by
low wages, unemployment, under-employment, high housing costs and all the other methods the capitalists have of reaping profits and keeping the working class down. This was underscored in a report by the New York
City
Coalition Against Hunger. The report indicated that "more than 1 million city residents depend on hard-pressed food pantries and soup kitchens for their basic needs." (New York Times, Aug. 9) In the very shadow of Wall Street where trillions
of dollars
are traded back and forth every day--in the financial center of the great free-enterprise profit system where the lords of capital rake in the profits wrung from the peoples of the world--exploitation and oppression keeps one in every eight people dependent on food aid just to survive. BUILD A MULTINATIONAL,
WORKING-CLASS FIGHT BACK
There are many examples that show how the growing
crisis of
capitalism is already a menace to the workers and the poor, and how it falls most heavily on Black, Latino, Asian, Native and Arab peoples, and immigrant workers especially-- the lowest paid and least protected. But the most important conclusion that can be drawn
from all
the statistics and warnings is that a mighty fight-back must be organized. The Bush administration has adopted a program of war, racism and repression as Washington's answer to the developing crisis. Bush, with the compliance of the entire capitalist
media,
has demonized Saddam Hussein, conjured racist images of Middle Eastern peoples and Islam, declared that it is the right of the Pentagon to go any place, any time to intervene in any oppressed country on the phony grounds of the "war against terrorism." Bush, who together with his brother--Florida Gov.
Jeb Bush--
and the Republican Party apparatus stole the election through the wholesale racist exclusion of Black voters, has promoted racism at home and abroad to divide the people, justify repression and prepare for war. The first step in organizing a united struggle
against the
real enemy, the rich bosses, is for white workers to give a firm rebuff to racism and for all workers to reject super- patriotic chauvinism. What is needed is to force the bosses and their
government
in Washington, including the pro-big-business, racist Democratic Party leadership, to declare that the working class is legally entitled to every single penny that they put into their pension funds. These funds represent trillions of dollars in wages in the form of the future consumption funds of workers and their families. Just because millionaires and billionaires gambled
with
those funds does not change the fact that if they don't return what they owe the workers, it is plain theft-hundreds of millions of hours of labor worked for nothing. The labor leadership, instead of preaching about
finding
"responsible corporate leadership," should concentrate on mobilizing to recover what legally belongs to the workers. The AFL-CIO should never have abandoned the fixed-benefit pension plans to begin with and agreed to the financiers' 401(k) gambling scheme. But now it is time to make up for it by mobilizing to make the rich and the government return the workers' hard-earned wages recklessly squandered by brokers and investors in the Wall Street casino called the Stock Exchange. It is high time to demand free, quality health care
for all.
It is time to assert that food is a right. That a job is a right. That affordable housing is a right. It is time to build an independent multinational working-class movement to meet the capitalist crisis head on--not to be afraid to oppose the war; not to be afraid to fight racism, to raise women's rights, lesbian, gay, bi and trans rights, the rights of immigrant workers, or in general represent the oppressed and exploited. Such a movement would be based on the common
recognition
that the working class is the fundamental class in society because it has created all the wealth. It must resist being forced to bear the brunt of a crisis brought on by the mad speculation and wild investment schemes of the financial aristocracy and the billionaire magnates of industry. CAPITALIST PROFIT SYSTEM
AT ROOT OF PROBLEM
If the economic crisis deepens, there will be a
host of
solutions offered to solve it. But the truth is that capitalism cannot be cured of crisis. The tendency for the economic system to fluctuate
through
cycles of boom and bust, more or less severe, bringing unemployment, misery and dislocation to the mass of the people, is inherent in the system of private property in the means of production-capitalism. A most popular and appealing solution to the crisis
is to
have the capitalist government spend money to put buying power in the pockets of the workers and for businesses to raise wages and thus keep them going. To be sure, wages should be raised and workers should fight for benefits and social services from the government to get relief from the hardships imposed by capitalism. But this will not, and never has, been able to stave off a capitalist crisis, even during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This "solution" is based on the under-consumption
theory.
According to this theory, the crisis is caused by production outstripping consumption under capitalism. It is indeed inevitable that production outstrips consumption under capitalism, and this precipitates a crisis. But this does not explain the inevitability of the crisis--it is merely a description of it. The contradiction between consumption and
production, which
results in overproduction and a glut of commodities that cannot be sold, is rooted in the anarchy of production, not in consumption. What appears as a crisis of consumption originates in capitalist production. Anarchy of production is inherent in capitalism.
Ruthless,
often violent, competition is an absolute law of capitalism. The plans of the capitalist monopolies are not made for or by the capitalist class as a whole or for society as a whole. They are made by separate groupings of finance capitalists in struggle against each other and against all their imperialist rivals abroad. Each grouping plans on the basis of expanding its
own sales
and profits. Each grouping races to the scene where a profit can be made to try and conquer market share and garner maximum profit. There is no stopping them from competing to build capacity in anticipation of future profits. By the same token, when the market is glutted with
commodities because this feverish competition has produced vast overcapacity and prices and profits begin to fall, nothing will compel them to continue investing. The crisis of consumption and the anarchy of
production are
absolutely inevitable outcomes of the profit system-the private ownership of the vast, socialized, interconnected system of global production by a tiny handful of billionaires who have no connection with the actual creation of wealth. It is the international working class and peasants that actually create the wealth of this world with their sweat and toil. The only way to overcome this contradiction is for
the
workers to abolish private property, take over the economy and run it for human use, not for profit--that is, by creating socialism. - END -
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