A Crisis of the System Itself
Computers and robots produce goods and services faster and more efficiently than human labor possibly can. In turn, the owners of production – the capitalist class – need fewer and fewer workers, while simultaneously more is being produced. Continuously, with every advance of electronic production, more workers are laid off, with no ability to consume the goods and services saturating the capitalist marketplace.
This abundance can either be distributed to all in society, including the increasing numbers of people with no ability to buy it, or it can be withheld, to be purchased by only those steadily decreasing numbers of people with enough income to do so.
This is more than a capitalist crisis of overproduction. It’s a crisis of the capitalist system itself – a crisis of capitalist production and exchange – where global production without human labor is destroying the capitalist market itself.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the buying and selling of labor power. Workers sell their ability to work to the capitalists to be utilized in production. In doing so, workers create value for the capitalists. The workers receive a portion of the value they create in the form of wages and the capitalists realize a portion of the value-added as profit. In order to live, the workers buy back the goods and services they have produced. This is an essential part in completing the circuit of capitalist production and exchange.
Robots and computers create no value and buy no goods and services, while permanently replacing workers in the production process, which eliminates the workers’ ability to buy goods and services. As more is being produced, less can be consumed within the confines of a capitalist system.
The Ruling Class Response
The U.S. ruling class understands its dilemma and is consciously moving to politically restructure industries and reorganize itself as a class to save the system of private property. This effort is being undertaken by the U.S. government to buy time, to prepare for the yet unknown political steps to reorganize society for a future economic system that keeps all productive private property in the hands of the ruling class.
Take, for example, the U.S. government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program. It has used $700 billion from our public treasury to prop up a failing financial services industry to weather the home mortgage crisis the industry created. Meanwhile, more than 1.5 million homeowners in the first six months of this year received foreclosure notices. June foreclosures were up 33% over May.
Another example is the recent bankruptcy reorganization of General Motors. The U.S. Treasury owns 60.8% of the new company at a cost of $50 billion, while GM’s overall U.S. employment will be reduced by 30%, from 91,000 to 64,000 by year’s end.
These restructuring and reorganization efforts – using monies of the public treasury – protect the interests of the entire ruling class. They are designed to safeguard its system of private property. At the same time U.S. unemployment has reached new high points, where the “official” June 2009 unemployment rate in the United States stood at nearly 15 million, or 9.5% (an increase of 7.2 million workers since January 2008).
We Can Choose a Different Path
These jobs are not coming back. But sure to come are more anguish, despair, destruction, misery and pain for larger sections of U.S. society. The U.S. working class and the new class of dispossessed emerging from within its ranks have reached an unprecedented fork in the road. Either we fall victims to those hell bent on forcefully creating a new system that guarantees that their class privilege, property and power stays intact, or we rise to the occasion and organize ourselves politically to hold our government accountable and to equitably distribute the overwhelming abundance being produced.
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People's Tribune Editorial Board
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-Cathleen Williams Sacramento
People's Tribune 'crucial' says contributor:
Never has it been more crucial to strengthen and expand the circulation of the People's Tribune. Leadership is emerging among the people who are "poor in things and rich in spirit"- and they need the news and analysis from the nation, from all the communities which are on the front lines struggling against harsh and brutal economic conditions.
We can do this. $5 a month from 200 people, $10 a month from a hundred people, $20 dollars a month from fifty people, $50 a month from twenty people - and we would have a thousand more dollars per month. The PT points the direction - it orients our leaders with a class perspective we just can't find anywhere else.
-Cathleen Williams Sacramento
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perspective to help put the struggle in context and point the way
toward victory. The People's Tribune gets no grants and has an
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