The U.S. working class, the nation’s poor and oppressed, won a resounding victory on Election Day 2014 when they cast their
“votes” for the most popular candidate of all—“None of the Above.” Indeed,
“None of the Above” won the much-hyped midterm election “contest” hands down,
when 64% of eligible voters declined to participate in the orchestrated U.S.
charade that poses as real politics.
The 34 percent Election Day turnout was the lowest in 72
years despite the twin parties of capitalism, spending record total of $4
billion in efforts to turn out their supporters. The traditional “lesser evil”
charade, in which the Democrats are portrayed as more receptive to working
people than the Republicans, gave way to a massive rejection of both parties. Obama’s
bailout to corporate America was accompanied by devastating attacks on
virtually all social programs as well as unprecedented attacks on the wages and
quality of life of the American working class—euphemistically called “the
middle class”. The “new jobs” claimed by Obama are overwhelmingly
low-wage—often minimum-wage—zero-benefit, part-time, and temporary. Median-adjusted
income for 2013 was $2100 less than when President Obama took office in 2009
and $3600 lower than when President Bush took office in 2001.
This growing disillusionment with capitalist politics is in
direct proportion to the concerted bipartisan attacks launched against working
people on every front at every level of society. Participation in the U.S.
workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, stands at a record low
over the past decade, registering 62.7 percent in 2014. Wages during the same
period have been in steep decline. Part-time, non-union, minimum-wage,
no-benefits, and sub-standard working-conditions jobs are increasingly the
norm. Capitalism’s “democratic” election antics—today virtually year-round,
corporate-organized, and almost theater-like spectacles—are designed to
camouflage the daily theft from working people of their livelihoods. The
unprecedented rejection of this reality in 2014 was an act of wisdom of the
great majority. In time it will be reflected in massive working-class
mobilizations in the streets, at the point of production, and in the formation
of a mass fighting workers’ organizations that will challenge the status quo
and open the door to revolutionary alternatives to predatory capitalism.
While the quality of life of the nation’s working masses has
been driven down to new depths, the ruling rich have prospered as never before,
with the rich-poor gap among the highest in earth. By every measure, government
policy has been to transfer trillions of dollars and vital social services of
every kind from working people to the miniscule minority ruling elite. It is
not just the American ruling class that robs the working masses but the
crisis-ridden ruling classes across the globe. There are no exceptions! The economic
recession is “resolved” through the imposition of massive austerity programs
implemented with abandon, as social services, health care, education, wages,
and working conditions are continually eroded, regardless of which capitalist
party is in power. Political activists who are beginning to challenge “the
system” must ask, Are the elite few, the “one percent,” (actually less than 0.1
percent) who really rule the country, personally evil because they crave ever
more trillions for their bank accounts? Or is there something more fundamental
that goes to the root of the crisis?
The capitalist system is mired in a long-term economic
crisis because of its very nature—the absolute imperative to expand and grow or
die. Today’s giant corporations are in constant battles with each other on a
world scale to secure markets for their competing commodities. Each
technological innovation in the productive process employed by one is quickly
matched or exceeded in productive capacity by the rest. What was a state-of
the-art auto factory yesterday becomes obsolete within months. The same holds
for every sphere of capitalist production. Those who employ the best, most
efficient, cost-saving technologies (as well as cheapening the cost of labor)
win the game, that is, until the remaining competitors are either compelled, at
great expense, to introduce the next level of technology or go out of business.
Wall Street’s current return to massive mergers and acquisitions is nothing
less than one of capitalism’s imperatives to consolidate the power to dominate
by absorbing the productive facilities of lesser competitors. Small
corporations are daily eaten and digested by their larger superiors. In the
same manner, the introduction of each new technology has the effect of
substituting super machines for human labor. Hence, we see the worldwide rise
in unemployment and the associated worldwide decline of the manufacturing
sectors in the world’s advanced capitalist nations.
Why invest in building relatively unprofitable factories
that produce commodities that have already saturated world markets and whose
rate of profit is ever declining? Why hire workers to do this? This simple
statistic, “91 percent,” goes a long way in explaining why today’s U.S. stock
market stands at an all-time high when jobs are at an all time low—since the
last Great Depression.
Historically, capitalists “plowed” some 15 percent of their earnings into
speculative ventures like the stock market and banking institutions. The rest
went into ever new and expanded “means of production”—that is, giant factories
and new machinery to extract and process needed raw materials. These required
workers in the tens of millions and more.
The fortunes of the ruling class are thus “grown” massively
while they produce in the real world of jobs and commodities, in proportion,
little or nothing!
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