The economic “recovery” from the greatest crisis since the Great Depression has left over 30 million U.S. workers and youth unemployed and underemployed and wages plummeting. “Recovery” means the bosses’ profits are rising, as there there are fewer workers who must work harder to increase the bosses’ productivity.
Billions have been handed over to the bankers and auto bosses while millions of families continue to lose their homes. And that’s as “good” as it’s going to get.
Now the bosses are squealing that the recovery is weakening and yet another major economic crisis looms. At best, they say, mass racist unemployment, as high as 50% among black males and higher among black youth, will continue for years. While Congress haggles over extending unemployment benefits, increased funding for the $3 trillion oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sails through uncontested.
The racist rulers need a working class that is ready to sacrifice and fight for U.S. imperialism. They’re losing in Iraq and Afghanistan and have Yemen, Pakistan and Iran waiting in the wings. So far, they’ve had some success in getting workers to sacrifice. They’ve yet to win workers ideologically to fight for them.
Nowhere are these sacrifices more evident than in the U.S. auto industry. This month Obama visited a Michigan GM plant and a Chicago Ford plant. This is after Ford announced $4 billion in second quarter profits and GM announced profits for two consecutive quarters for the first time in years.
And why not? Obama and the UAW leadership teamed up to close dozens of plants, cut wages by as much as $30,000/year, and destroy more than 200,000 jobs. And that’s just since the meltdown of 2008-2009. Billions of dollars and maybe a million jobs were sacrificed long before that. The starting pay for a GM, Ford or Chrysler worker has been cut by more than half, and they’ll have no pension if and when they retire.
These massive sacrifices took place with a minimum of resistance, highlighted by the three-month strike at American Axel in 2007 and Ford workers rejecting a final round of concessions in 2008. The UAW, now led by religious, “social activist” president Bob King, has reached a new low by claiming the bosses’ profits as a “victory” for the workers. “We saved the auto industry, and U.S. jobs.” It’s no accident that King, the former UAW-VP at Ford, which made the greatest profits, is now the UAW president!
Open Union-Corporate Alliance
Signals Impending Fascism & War
While having a passive working class helps the rulers cut wages and steal jobs, it’s a double-edged sword. They need a politically-motivated working class to mobilize for a future of poverty and expanding war. In order to win them, they have to put workers in the streets to give vent to their frustrations. That’s a very risky proposition for the racist rulers and their union front men.
So it is with that in mind that the NAACP, UAW, Teamsters, SEIU, TWU, ATU and hundreds of unions and “progressive” community and religious organizations are planning the “One Nation” march on Washington, D.C. on October 2. In the short-term, it’s a counter-attack on the Tea Party and a mass “Get-Out-The-Vote” effort (for Democrats) in the mid-term Congressional elections just a month later. “One Nation” is a reference to Obama’s campaign pledge of “no blue states, no red states.”
This is all part of the rulers’ and Obama’s attempt to lump workers and bosses under one nationalist flag. They want to win workers away from viewing themselves as a working class exploited by the bosses’ class.
But beyond the elections is the more sinister effort to begin to win the working class in earnest to a future of war and fascism. U.S. imperialism needs more than our wages and health benefits. They need our commitment and our very lives. After 9/11, Bush told everyone to “go shopping.” That was a serious error for which the rulers never forgave him. Workers and youth can’t be won to war and fascism in the mall. They have to be in the streets.
PLP accepts this challenge. As the rulers try to put a million workers in Washington, D.C., we will be there fighting for the political leadership of the working class, fighting to have anti-racism, internationalism and communist revolution make an impact on the mass movement. This can’t be done with a few lone wolves handing out leaflets with the “right idea.”
This can only be accomplished by mobilizing our base in the mass movement to weigh in in a big way. On our jobs and in our unions we will organize not just against the racist Tea Party, but to oppose Obama and our union “leaders” as well. It wasn’t the Tea Party that cut 200,000 auto jobs and slashed our wages in half!
In the schools and campuses, we can organize busloads of youth to oppose the plans the rulers have for us to kill and die for U.S. imperialism. And we should organize contingents of unemployed workers to march, whether they are recently laid-off transit workers, former Stella D’Oro strikers or those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits.
A racist system that can’t provide jobs should be destroyed. Communist revolution will smash racist unemployment. We can win the masses to break away from their misleaders and fight for communism. In the build-up to October 2, the ball is very much in our court.