“Getting back on the road,” means putting the millions of unemployed back to the work they were laid off from. This would require abandoning trillions of dollars worth of wage-less, electronic productive equipment and withdrawing from the global network of production and selling. This would mean going from more profitable to less profitable production. History shows that humanity never relinquishes what it has achieved. Instead, human beings always reconstruct the economic relations in order to maintain the new, more profitable ways of creating social wealth. Therefore, history never goes backward without the wholesale destruction of the means of production.
Understanding the crisis of the system begins with a description of the system. The basis of the capitalist system is that the worker sells his ability to work to the capitalist; the capitalist then utilizes that labor power to create valuable commodities to be sold to society. Labor is the sole creator of value, and profit is the difference between the cost of labor power and the value it creates.
Up to today, every crisis has been a crisis within the system. How do such crises arise? The means of production are constantly developing. Each development in the means of production disturbs the relationship between the economy and the organization of society. For example, an improvement in a drill press allows one person to do the work of five. Four then become unemployed and are forced to find work in other areas. The commodities made by the improved drill press become lower in value and the price falls. These stages accumulate into severe contradictions between a slightly different economy and the same old society. At that point a political struggle to reform social and political institutions begins. The mechanization of Southern agriculture that accelerated the urbanization of the southern African Americans and the resultant Freedom Struggles is such an example. The rise of Ford-ism, giant factories, the concentration of industrial workers and the rise of the industrial union is another such example. There were other factors that were part of the process such as history or ideology. It must be noted that while these developments created severe contradiction between new aspects of the economic foundation and old social organization, they did not create antagonism. Because these economic developments made labor more productive, they did not replace it. Resultant reform strengthened the economy and brought society closer to it.
The current crisis has followed the same historic pattern. The difference today is that the new, more efficient means of producing social wealth - robotics - do not enhance the productivity of the worker. They replace the worker. Eliminating the worker slowly eliminates value, the foundation of the capitalist system, throwing the entire system into a critical crisis. As the actual nature of the crisis became clear, the government set aside $12.8 trillion to intervene in the private sector in an attempt to salvage the system or usher in a new system compatible with private property. It was an admission of the failure of the system.
The de facto nationalization of a huge section of the economy calls into question not just the capitalist system, but the existence of private property as well. The implications of nationalization and bailouts of the corporations have not been lost on the people. There were immediate cries of “Bail me out, too!” This growing alliance between government and corporate power intensifies the fascist danger. It also shines a light on the class nature of the government and opens the way for a new level of propaganda for a society where private property is transformed into public property. Revolutionaries can now do more than fight back. They can put forth the vision and fight for a system and government that belongs to the people and provides for them the way this government provides for the corporations.
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