What Working Class Power Can Do
January 2025 marks the beginning of the 25th year of the publication of Socialist Viewpoint magazine. Capitalism, in its death spiral, is wreaking havoc on the wellbeing of workers everywhere. It has nothing to offer the working class but more austerity, authoritarianism and endless wars.
This is not just an American experience, but the reality of workers everywhere. Workers in every country are suffering oppression and exploitation yet have not been able to escape the divide and conquer trap designed to turn us against each other.
Our children’s lives are dependent upon how “successful” our lives are. By “successful” they mean by how much money we have accumulated.
But there are two very different standards we are ruled by.
Workers start out with nothing and must sell our labor for a tiny fraction of the wealth our labor produces.
The capitalists start out with the ownership of the means of production and all wealth produced by our labor, minus the least amount of money they can get away with paying us.
There are no equal playing grounds under capitalist rule
The wealthy rule, and we workers must pay for every scrap we eat, home we live in, drop of water we drink, the healthcare we get, and transportation to and from work. The taxes that pay all the expenses of our capitalist government and their armies and police come out of our paychecks. It is our lives on the battlefields, our homes that are destroyed while they live in luxury and safety.
Workers on the brink
of economic ruin
We all want the same things, a job that supports the needs of ourselves and our family—housing; healthcare; education; leisure time with family and friends. These things are not a gift we must earn, but our right as human beings who create all the wealth of the world through our labor.
The wage packages won in 2024 that seemed so large are still not enough to forestall the bill collectors. When they say inflation is down, it doesn’t mean that prices have gone down—on the contrary, it only means they have not risen quite as quickly as they had before—but they are going up every day.
Every dime that has been won in recent labor struggles has been at the expense of workers who have lost weeks and months on strike without pay in order to gain those paltry increases.
Workers’ pay is not keeping up with inflation, it is lagging further and further behind everywhere.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum are moving further to the right
Donald Trump will be inaugurated on January 20, 2025, having triumphed over Kamala Harris who was actually to the right of Joe Biden. The economic crisis workers are facing was not addressed by either party. Organized labor almost unanimously supported the Democratic Party but still lost to Trump. Lesser-evil politics failed to deliver anything but evil yet again.
The very definition of capitalism is that the ownership of the means of production and the wealth produced by masses of workers belongs to the bosses.
Their power over the masses of workers of the world is dependent upon dividing us against each other—convincing us that our economic hardship is caused by other workers competing for our jobs and driving down wages and increasing our taxes—so that every other worker becomes our enemy if they dare to seek a better life.
We are taught that the obnoxious inequality of wealth between the workers of the world and the wealthy capitalist elite is a fact of nature—a caricature of Darwin’s
“survival of the fittest” as applied to human beings. Their rational is that capitalists are owners of all the wealth because they are more “evolved” human beings and therefore our natural rulers and have been since the beginning of time.
But the capitalist class is, in fact, the least “evolved.”
They create nothing and own only what workers have made through our labor, creativity and collective work.
It is the labor of the masses that designed and built the pyramids, that brought forth every improvement in our lives and who have the power to create a world of equality, economic and social justice—and we outnumber the rulers by the tens-of-millions-to-one.
Building an independent organization of the working class to defend our right to democracy, and economic and social equality must be our rallying cry if we are to defeat capitalism’s descent into fascism and, ultimately, the destruction of life on earth.
What is missing everywhere across the planet is the realization among workers that our human interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the capitalists and, more importantly, that we have the power to take the control of our lives out of the hands of the capitalist class and build a world that turns the private ownership of the means of production into production for the benefit of all and for the preservation of the planet we share.
A party of labor unity and solidarity across the globe can achieve this very realistic and necessary goal.
The time is now!