Letters of February 11

CHALLENGE Chronicles
Our club has been back to the LA garment district four more times since our letter in the January 28 issue. So far our struggle to sell every issue on the same corner has been successful. Average sales have gone up and we’re collecting more money.
We are setting up meetings with two contacts. One donated $5 and said he had read CHALLENGE “many times” before. Perhaps most important, two workers in the mass organization we belong to have been participating with us. One was great at handing out the paper. He is improving in interacting with workers and requesting donations.
The other worker was timid at first about approaching people but when he saw that people were receptive, he turned into a tiger. When it was time to leave, he said, “Wait, I’m on a roll.” The two workers have also been meeting with our club and study group.
Unemployment NOT Bosses’ Policy             
The article in Jan. 14 issue of CHALLENGE, titled “Marchers hit Racist Understaffing, Welfare for Bosses,” says, “...capitalism needs unemployment in order to drive down wages, a necessary measure for any boss to stay competitive.”  I think there are two things wrong with that formulation, even though as a whole the article is excellent (as are almost all articles in CHALLENGE).
First, it implies that whatever capitalism needs it has the ability to create. While this is true of many ruling-class policies, such as imperialist military efforts or racist and brutal police forces that are uncontrollable by the communities they patrol, unemployment is not a policy.
The capitalist class, the active embodiment of capitalism, has no way of creating unemployment regardless of what it “needs.” Unemployment is an unintended aggregate result of the decisions of many competing capitalist firms, each trying to maximize its profits in the face of competition from other corporations in the same business, so as to prevent their going out of business. They have no more control over unemployment, a society-wide phenomenon, than they do over periodic recessions/depressions. Both unemployment and periodic recessions/depressions are the unintended result of a number of independent decisions at the individual corporation level and not the result of a planned action on the class level.
It is certainly true that unemployment is a net benefit to the capitalist class as a whole, as it weakens the workers’ ability to fight for higher wages and better working conditions. But net benefit is not the same as something that capitalism (read the ruling class as a whole) needs and therefore, by implication, deliberately creates. Yet the formulation in the quoted sentence implies that they can and do deliberately create it.
Second, the same sentence states that unemployment is “a necessary measure for any boss to stay competitive.”  This is simply not true, in my view. In order for bosses “to stay competitive” it is not necessary that unemployment exist at all. Even if unemployment did not sexist — an imaginable condition even though it is impossible in capitalist societies for other reasons — all competing capitalists would face the same condition and be helpless to do anything about it other than lay off or fire their own workers. It is only the relative advantage of some firms over others, and not a common condition faced by the entire class, that determines which ones stay competitive.  
Ferguson: Life Changing Experience
Being in ferguson has become a life changing experience for me. We fought hard and we will continue to fighter even harder with each day that passes us by. We fight for the working class and I had a handful of mixed emotions that reminded me of the hardest working person I knew, my father. He was a working class man who worked his hardest even after he discovered that he had cancer. I’m determined to fight back and fight just as hard as he did during his last days because to me fighting for the working class is fighting for my father.