Letters - 08 September 2010

Workers’ Fight vs. Joblessness Can Become ‘School for Communism’

As CHALLENGE has repeatedly explained, capitalism breeds unemployment, which produces a “reserve army of the unemployed.” The bosses use this reserve army to threaten employed workers with loss of their jobs if they don’t accept lower wages and speed-up. This lowers the wages and conditions of the whole working class and keeps them subservient. It also leads to increased sexist wage differentials for women workers.

Because of racism, black and Latino workers in the U.S, and immigrant workers worldwide, suffer twice the jobless rates of white workers. This is used to divide and weaken the entire working class.

Full employment is impossible under a profit system. Only communism can achieve full employment, in a society without bosses and profits, with their resulting recessions/depressions.

Even the capitalists’ media is reporting that massive unemployment will be continuing for years, having reached 33 million in the U.S. and into the hundreds of millions in Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia, with no end in sight. This affects working-class families in every sector of the economy, including first-job-seekers, students and returning vets.

Unemployment is, along with imperialist war, probably the capitalist evil that relates to every aspect of a communist analysis of the system. So it becomes vital to unite the employed and unemployed, and help organize a working-class fight-back. The potential exists to recruit many workers and youth to PLP. The unity of the working class is a prerequisite for making a communist revolution.

Therefore, it would be extremely important to raise this issue in every mass organization and win them to set up committees in unions, shops, schools and campuses, in communities and churches, which would provide the opportunity to explain a communist analysis of the roots of unemployment and therefore why capitalism must be destroyed.

If committees on this issue could be organized in any or all these areas, it might be possible to use this as a springboard to launch a larger movement against the ravages of unemployment. These committees could reach out to the unemployed in the communities. Teachers could ask who’s unemployed by polling their students on unemployed family members and/or their friends, bus drivers  could distribute committee literature to their passengers, and so on.

Such a movement could raise demands like: unemployment benefits for all (currently a huge percentage of workers are ineligible) and for the full period of unemployment. Also benefits for jobless returning vets (after World War II all jobless GIs received $20 a week, equal to hundreds in current dollars, for 52 weeks, the “52-20” program); unity with workers threatened with layoffs; organizing the unemployed to support strikers’ picket lines and push the demand for jobs in the strikers’ demands.

This occurred in the Great Depression when communists organized a National Unemployment Council of 800,000 that put millions of the jobless on the streets in protests, supported strikes and which is what won unemployment insurance in the first place.

But we should not make the mistake those communists did, of not tying unemployment to the need to destroy capitalism with revolution.

A Brooklyn Reader