As they confront this crisis, the capitalists try to disorient and divide workers to gut our ability to resist. A favored tactic is the fraud of bankruptcy, through which the bosses buy time and legal cover to preserve their capital and “restructure”—that is, cut back on jobs, conditions, wages, and benefits.

A more fundamental tactic is that of divide and rule. The capitalists and their propagandists seek to persuade workers that those who toil in plants overseas are “taking our jobs.” Through such statements they justify their own protectionist barriers and seek to blind workers to the reality that we face common conditions of exploitation and the same capitalist enemy around the world.

The contraction in textile manufacturing is part of a broader crisis that increasingly affects industrial workers. A recent report on joblessness in New York, for example, points out that “blue collar” workers make up 30 percent of the unemployed although they are only 20 percent of the city’s labor force. The proportions are opposite among administrative personnel, professionals, and technicians.

This is the result of an accelerating capitalist economic depression worldwide. The impending layoffs at Pillowtex and other plants cannot be confronted simply on a local level or by going along with the trade union officialdom’s class-collaborationist dreams of trying to find “better buyers” for factories threatened with closures.

The conditions of depression—making themselves evident even in the citadel of imperialism, the U.S.A—have their roots in the falling average rate of industrial profit that started as early as the mid-1960s in Britain and as late as the mid-1970s in Japan. We are living in a declining segment of the curve of capitalist development. We can expect decades of hard rain in the capitalist economy.

What does capitalism have to offer? Intensified competition between imperialist powers for redivision of the world, the motor force of the U.S.-led assault on Iraq and other wars to come. Excess capacity and overproduction of commodities, that is, more output than the capitalists can sell at a high enough profit to justify expanding their productive plant and equipment Declining capital investment in capacity-increasing plants and equipment. Speculative binges and debt explosions. Growing bank and business failures. Devastation of semicolonial countries Crippling farm crises in the imperialist countries, disproportionately affecting producers from the oppressed nationalities. Declining real wages and accelerating speedup. And, above all, rising unemployment and a growing relative surplus population.

The capitalists’ falling average rate of profit results not only in “surplus” plant, “surplus” food, and other “surplus” capital and commodities. It also produces what Karl Marx, one of the founding leaders of the communist movement, described as a “relative surplus population.” The layoffs of wageworkers and dispossession of agricultural producers proceed at an accelerating pace and outstrip capitalism’s capacity to absorb this surplus labor power into new employment. The expanding army of the unemployed becomes a source of pressure used by the capitalists to intensify labor and hold down the wages of employed workers, and to increase competition among all workers.

As Marx said, “the condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and vice versa, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists.”

As capitalism disintegrates, working people are threatened more and more with impoverishment. Under this menace, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of our class into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the crumbs of a declining society. Immediate demands are needed to unite workers and their allies on the land to confront the impending disaster.

We must demand jobs for all. Public works are sorely needed to address acute social needs such as building and repairing schools, hospitals, and the deteriorating infrastructure. The right to employment is the only serious right left for workers in a society based on exploitation. But it’s being shorn from them at every step. The time is ripe to advance the slogan of a shorter workweek with no cut in pay to spread available work and bind the employed and the jobless together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility.

Increase the minimum wage to union scale and enforce affirmative action programs! These demands are also needed to unify the toilers. Solidarity is needed across borders, too. That’s why canceling the Third World debt must be included in this program of transitional demands.

Property owners and their spokespeople will try to prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists will also refer to their account ledgers. The workers must categorically denounce such conditions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization, and ruin. The question is one of life and death for the only creative and progressive class, and by that token for the future of humanity. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only in struggle. Through this struggle—no matter what its immediate practical successes may be—more workers will come to understand the necessity of getting rid of capitalism and its dog-eat-dog reality and morality, and of replacing it with a society based on human solidarity and the needs of the majority of the earth’s toilers.
 
 
Related article:
Pillowtex plans to sell unionized plants  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home