TELL-AVIV, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, July 20 — Moshe Silman, died from his wounds after setting himself on fire during last week’s rally against the government’s economic policy. This act of desperation served as an example to several other workers, pushed to the brink of suicide by the inhuman capitalist system, who began setting themselves on fire to protest their poverty.
One hundred sixy years ago, Marx and Engels wrote how the capitalist system, in its dog-eat-dog competition between businesses, drives many petit-bourgeois (the self-employed and the small businessmen) into the proletariat (working class). Silman’s tale is a clear example of this. At one time he owned a tiny transport company with four trucks, but due to debts to the National Insurance (Israel’s “Social Security”), one of his trucks was repossessed, starting a downward spiral for him.
Soon he found himself penniless, forced to work for his living as a taxi-cab driver. Eventually he suffered a series of strokes, forcing him off his job. He then had to live on about $550 a month in disability benefits, hardly enough to pay for food, medications and rent. Finally, he found himself living on the mean streets. As an act of protest, he committed suicide by setting himself on fire.
Capitalism is an economic system with no mercy. The bosses (much less than “1%” of the population) own great wealth produced by the labor of workers. The workers (more than “99%”) own nothing substantial and are forced to sell their labor power — essentially, the best part of one’s life and livelihood — in order to earn an often meager existence. There is no real middle ground between these two classes. Competition between businesses leads to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few big capitalists at the expense of their smaller and less vicious competitors, who end up, in many cases, driven into the working class. Even the so-called “middle class,” workers who were given a few more crumbs than usual from the bosses’ table, find themselves more and more thrown back to the bottom of the working class by the crisis of the capitalist system.
The only real way out of this hell on earth is to get rid of the root of the problem, the capitalist system itself. Instead of harming themselves out of desperation, workers should organize, fight back and eventually lead a communist revolution under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party to overthrow the profit system once and for all. Only together, led by a Party of millions of workers, will we be able to build a real future — a communist future where workers will run the world for the interest of the working class!