Jobs, capitalism & the tasks ahead
By Fred Goldstein
Jan 11, 2012
The pitiful December jobs and employment numbers are a bitter reminder, four
years after the present crisis officially began in December 2007, that
capitalism is at a dead end.
There have now been four years of mass unemployment; the foreclosure and
eviction nightmare continues for millions; poverty and hunger are growing at
record levels. For those with jobs, low wages are spreading like a plague. A
whole generation of youth is either locked out of the job market or consigned
to dead-end jobs. Recent studies show that the U.S., instead of being the
“land of opportunity,” is the land of downward mobility for the
vast majority.
That is why it is so outrageous that the big-business media have tried to
make a mountain out of a molehill, expressing enthusiasm over the December jobs
report. If you are one of the 25 million to 30 million workers unemployed or
underemployed, the 200,000 jobs allegedly created in December and the drop in
the official unemployment rate from 8.6 percent to 8.5 percent amount to a very
tiny molehill.
The jobs report barely mentioned that, according to the government’s
own figures, 13.1 million are still unemployed, another 8.1 million are working
part-time but need full-time work, and 2.3 million more have “dropped
out” of the work force altogether. This last number is drastically
understated because it excludes millions who either haven’t looked for a
job in the last year or have never entered the work force because there are no
jobs.
The mouthpieces of U.S. capitalism are engaged in a cynical exercise known
as “talking up the economy.” Yet they all know that even this tiny
increase in jobs is really overstated by at least 42,000, because of the
addition of short-term courier and messenger jobs for the holiday season
— leaving the net number of jobs created at 160,000.
When you consider that during the month of December anywhere from 125,000 to
150,000 additional jobs were needed just to absorb the young people who became
eligible to enter the work force, then even according to the official numbers
the net increase in jobs was only between 10,000 and 35,000. If the capitalist
economy were to continue to add jobs at that rate, it would take many decades
to put the 25 million to 30 million unemployed and underemployed back to work
at full-time jobs.
So the molehill gets even tinier, if it exists at all.
Occupy Wall Street: “Enough is
enough!”
Month after month, year after year, workers have been
waiting for an upturn that would put the millions back to work, with decent
pay, benefits and job security. It hasn’t happened. Things have only
changed for the worse.
It is to the credit of the Occupy Wall Streeters that they
decided not to wait any longer. Since Sept. 17, they have taken action all
across the country to expose the rich and powerful.
In the face of police repression, they have found ways to
continue. Their message of fightback is getting through to broad layers of the
population, including the labor movement, the communities, students and working
people in general.
To keep the OWS message of resistance from getting any
further, the capitalist media, after an initial burst of coverage, have decided
on near-total censorship of the hundreds of activities going on around the
country. OWS has at least the passive support and sympathy of millions. The
ruling class wants to shrink that support and prevent it from
spreading.
Ruling class fears spread of revolutionary
Marxism
The ruling class has another great fear about OWS —
the fear that sections of the movement will turn toward revolutionary Marxist
ideology.
Right now the OWS movement is directing its fire against
the most powerful capitalist institutions: the banks and the politicians who
bail them out.
It has also targeted the mortgage companies and put people
back in their homes after foreclosure. It has demonstrated against industrial
corporations as exploiters, polluters and merchants of death — part of
the military-industrial complex. It has taken on the prison-industrial complex
and the police for racist stop-and-frisk policies. It has expressed solidarity
with immigrant workers. Sections of this movement have rejected the two
capitalist parties — the Democrats as well as the Republicans.
Marxism has a comprehensive view of all the institutions
and evils that OWS is fighting against. It has a scientific view that ties all
these institutions to the system of private property. Marxism has shown that
the capitalist class has created a global system of production and distribution
based upon a complex, socialized labor process involving hundreds of millions
of workers on every continent.
Marxism illuminates how a tiny group of billionaires is
able to treat the vast, globalized productive forces as their own private
domain. The obscene inequality, the extraordinary wealth of the 1% —
short-hand for the capitalist ruling class — is generated over and over
again by the process of capitalist exploitation.
Under capitalism, workers are completely cut off from
owning or controlling the means of production, distribution or services.
Hospital workers cannot afford health care, yet they work in medical
institutions owned by bosses or the capitalist state. Agricultural workers
cannot afford to give their families healthy diets, yet they produce the food.
Workers making $14 an hour under the new two-tier, low-wage contracts in the
auto industry will not be able to afford the cars they produce.
The hospital services, the food, the autos will all be sold
by the owners for profit. Meanwhile, the workers have to sell their labor to
some boss and receive just enough to live on — more or less, depending
upon conditions and the level of class struggle.
What the boss takes is unpaid labor in the form of what
Marx called surplus value or capitalist profits. That is how the capitalist
system runs. That is what generates inequality and all the instruments and
institutions of repression necessary to enforce such an unjust system —
not just in the U.S., but throughout the world capitalist profit
system.
Marx showed that banks are the financial nerve center of
capitalism. Money is the start of everything under capitalism —
production and exploitation begin with money capital. Banks control the
financial arteries of capitalism. Updating Marxism in the age of imperialism,
Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin showed how the banks merged with the
industrialists and the giant retailers to control the lives of businesses large
and small.
Corporations are understood by Marxists to be the engines
of exploiting the workers. They steal the labor of the workers, turn it into
profits, and use the wealth to expand their capital — as well as enable
the corporate owners to live in obscene extravagance. In the long run, the
banks thrive off the profits extracted by the capitalists from the workers
— profits that are deposited in corporate bank accounts or wind up in
federal, state and local government treasuries, from which they return to the
banks in the form of interest.
Marxism has a view of the state as an instrument for the
oppression of one class by another to secure its form of class rule —
today, that means the capitalist exploitation of the workers. The police in the
U.S., together with Homeland Security and other government agencies like the
FBI, the courts and the prisons are the hard core of the capitalist state. They
enforce capitalist law against the workers and the oppressed and anyone who
wants to defend the interests of the masses. They protect capitalist private
property.
The cops break strikes, protect strikebreakers, put down
rebellions, protect the drug trade and enforce racist police-state rule against
the African-American, Latino/a and Asian communities. There is also the Bureau
of Indian Affairs — federal cops used to oppress Native
people.
The Pentagon is the enforcer of global imperialist
domination on behalf of transnational capital, including the banks, the oil
companies, and big industrial and service corporations that super-exploit
workers in low-wage, underdeveloped, formerly colonial countries and plunder
their resources.
Socialist revolution is the
solution
Many in the Occupy movement already consider themselves
revolutionaries and anti-capitalists. It is a natural transition from
struggling against all the essential institutions of capitalism to developing
an analysis of the fundamental nature of the system and a revolutionary
perspective for ending it.
Marxism has shown that the fundamental contradiction in
modern capitalist society is the contradiction between the socially organized
system of production and the private ownership of the productive forces of
society.
The capitalists treat this global system as their own. When
it brings them profit, they keep it going. In pursuit of greater and greater
profits, each capitalist grouping tries to make its workers more and more
productive through the application of technology. What results is more and more
commodities produced while wages remain in a narrow boundary. In recent decades
wages have generally gone down due to technology and the deskilling of
jobs.
The result is greater and greater crises of capitalist
overproduction — a mass of goods that cannot be sold for a profit. That
is when layoffs begin. Enterprises are shut down. Workers’ hours are cut.
Wages and benefits are cut. A handful of billionaires in boardrooms decide the
fate of tens and hundreds of millions.
The present “recession” is the longest downturn
by far since World War II. Capitalism, still going through a jobless
“recovery,” is facing a new downturn. The system has become so
productive it cannot revive itself. It has reached a dead end.
Marxism has shown that the only historical alternative to
private ownership of the socialized productive system is to overthrow private
property and socialize ownership. This means that the working class and the
oppressed have to organize to seize political power and take the means of
production and distribution away from the billionaires — the 1% who are
the capitalist exploiters — in order to make the economy the social
property of the people, to be used for human need, not profit and human
greed.
This transformation of property relations will take a
thoroughgoing and profound proletarian revolution made by the workers and all
the oppressed, ultimately involving the mobilization of millions. This will
lead to the liberation of the entire human race.
Goldstein is the author of “Low-Wage
Capitalism.”
Colossus with feet of clay
Low-Wage Capitalism
What the new globalized, high-tech imperialism means for the class struggle
in the U.S
By Fred Goldstein.
"With the capitalist system demonstrably
unfair, irrational, and prone to intermittent crises, it is useful, indeed
refreshing, to see a Marxist analysis of globalization and its effects on
working people. Fred Goldstein's LOW-WAGE CAPITALISM does exactly
that." — Howard Zinn
Order Colossus with feet of clay;
Low-Wage Capitalism
