People's Tribune July 2012 , page 3

The global economic crisis is escalating. The economies and fates of countries around the world are bound together by globalization. Europe’s deepening financial crisis is approaching economic collapse. It threatens to expand into a global economic depression.

Last month, Eurozone countries agreed to lend up to $125 billion to Spain's banks. They hope to provide enough capital to avoid a financial meltdown from occurring and spreading across Europe and the world, because Spain’s banks hold more than $220 billion in bad commercial real estate loans. This bailout follows the hundreds of billions loaned to Greece, Portugal and Ireland over the last two years.

This is how the global crisis is playing itself out. We are told the problem is too much debt, too many bad loans. But what is actually destroying the global economy is the irresolvable conflict between electronic and robotic production and capitalism.

Robotic production is shattering the system of buying and selling labor power that is the foundation of capitalism. Under capitalism, capitalists buy the labor power of the workers to produce things. Those things then have to be sold to the workers for the capitalists to make their profits. The workers use their wages to buy what they need and want. This cycle of buying and selling keeps the system going.

More and more things are being produced with robots and computers instead of human labor. This creates growing permanent unemployment. People without jobs can’t buy anything, and of course robots can’t buy anything either. This disrupts the cycle of buying and selling. This antagonism between robotic production and capitalism is destroying capitalism and the society it has produced.

For decades, the global capitalist class has kept its system afloat by extending credit and loans to business, governments and consumers. That came to an abrupt end in 2008, when the real estate credit bubble burst in the United States. Since then, in an effort to deal with the crisis, governments around the world have demanded cutbacks for the mass of the people, while using public money to bail out the financial industry. The capitalist system is on its last legs, but the capitalist class is doing everything it can to maintain its property, power and privilege, even if it means starvation for the rest of us.

Capitalism is the problem, not technology. Laborless robotic production gives us unlimited abundance, yet capitalism prevents us from enjoying it. The obvious solution is to get capitalism and its tiny ruling class of billionaires out of the way. We have a right to live. If the people own and control the technology of production, we can make what we need and distribute it to everyone. The people are in a fight for the political and economic power to determine the future. Every struggle we wage today should be seen as part of a broader fight for a new world of peace and abundance.