Melanie Gutermuth is a twenty-five-year-old veteran. She served in the Army for four years. Since the completion of her service, she has been greeted with twelve months of unemployment. Joseph Jacobo is an Iraq war veteran. At the end of his military service, only the streets welcomed him home. He has been homeless since his return. Melanie and Joseph are two among hundreds of thousands of unemployed and/or homeless veterans.
There is a lot of talk about “taking care” of veterans returning from war, but the realities of capitalism, the system of profit we live under, hit them just as hard as their fellow
civilian working-class brothers and sisters. The Department of Labor statistics report that the number of unemployed veterans has increased to more than 250,000 and the Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that over 200,000 veterans are currently homeless. While some claim that widespread problems among veterans such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or substance abuse are to blame, a closer look at capitalism exposes the real root of the issues veterans are faced with.
Capitalism is an economic system based on profit. In order to remain competitive with other bosses around the globe, U.S. bosses must maximize profits by exploiting workers as much as possible. Under the best circumstances, some members of the working class are allowed to live comfortably. The profits earned through the super exploitation of most black and Latino workers have been sufficient to keep the U.S. bosses on top. In the current economic crisis though, this is no longer enough and mass lay-offs and unemployment become unavoidable.
Although this crisis began due to some major calculation errors on the part of the big banks, economic crises are inevitable under capitalism. The drive for maximum profit will always cause these crises. As long as we continue to allow this system to exist, the working class will suffer at the hand of the ruling class’ greed. In order to guarantee that veterans and all workers have a place to live and a means for survival, we must build a communist society which will be run in the interest of the working class. This means that society will be run by workers in order to meet the needs of the whole working class.
Soldiers, sailors and marines have the potential to be the most important workers in this struggle. We are in the unique position to have been given weapons and sent into the most unstable and strategically important areas of the world that the U.S. bosses want to control. Armed with the revolutionary understanding that capitalism has nothing to offer the working class besides misery, we have the power to turn the guns around and replace this profit system with communism. Join Progressive Labor Party in the struggle to turn the bosses’ “Army strong” into a revolutionary movement for communism.