According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States faces the worst unemployment crisis of the last 70 years, with 15 million people officially unemployed, one-third of whom have been jobless for over six months. Another 9 million Americans are working part time because they can’t find the full-time jobs they want and need. The jobs shortage is so severe that there are now six unemployed for every job vacancy—double the ratio in the prior recession of the early 2000s.
All the indicators point to a crisis that is about to become dramatically worse. Banks continue to fail, the value of housing continues to fall, and now the value of commercial real estate is headed toward collapse. Credit to consumers and small business is drying up. Wages for those still employed are falling just as it appears that we’re headed for rising inflation and skyrocketing prices. State budget gaps are expected to exceed $160 billion in the year ahead. By one estimate, state adjustments to their budgets will slow national gross domestic product growth by enough over the next 12 months to cost the nation roughly 700,000 jobs. The cuts will also weaken or eliminate needed public services. The list goes on and on.
What must be done? First, the people must demand that the federal government directly intervene to guarantee that no one is homeless or hungry. After all, the government had no problem intervening to save the corporations. But this is only a short-term measure. In the long run it won’t solve the underlying problem. What is confronting us is a capitalist system that is dying. The electronic age means replacing labor with computers and robots. Because the only source of new economic value is the labor power of the workers, eliminating labor means eliminating value. The net effect of all this is that the system of buying and selling on which capitalism rests is being steadily destroyed. The capitalists won’t pay for labor they don’t need, and the workers without paychecks can’t buy the goods and services the capitalists are trying to sell. Labor being permanently replaced with electronics means the destruction of value, the destruction of the market, and finally the destruction of capitalism’s economic foundation.
This is not only an economic, but a moral and political crisis. What kind of society are we going to have? In the end, we either have to replace this capitalist society based on private property with a cooperative society based on public property—where what we produce is distributed according to need, not money—or we starve. But capitalism won’t fall over by itself. Who decides who is going to get what, and when, is a political question. We, the people, need the political power to impose our will on the giant corporations and restructure this society to serve our needs. To win this power, we first need to educate and organize ourselves so that we are politically independent of the corporations. Either we take over the corporations, or they will impose their dictatorship on society and structure it to serve their needs. It’s up to us.
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