Vol. 76/No. 6      February 13, 2012

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama extols examples in which bosses have recently made inroads against the wages and unions of working people as the way to fix “our” economy. But there is no “we.”

Our answer is working-class struggle and internationalist solidarity. Our examples are workers standing up to American Crystal Sugar, Caterpillar, EGT, Cooper Tire, Rio Tinto—a list that keeps growing as the exploiting class foists the burden of their crisis on our backs.

Obama’s nationalist demagogy is aimed at duping workers into seeing ourselves in competition with workers elsewhere, in a mirror of the increasingly cutthroat competition between capitalists worldwide. We are supposed to see ourselves in league with the imperialists and their efforts to increase their profits off the backs of labor—at home and abroad. In exchange we get a promise that they will provide more jobs, at lower pay of course.

But a growing layer of working people, particularly those engaged in struggle against the exploiting class, see themselves in the growing struggles of fellow toilers from Canada and Europe to the Middle East, Africa and Asia, as comments from readers in this week’s front-page article on the Militant’s renewal drive show.

Obama pledges that his administration will take all possible protectionist measures, backed up by the largest military on the face of the globe, as well as “take on illegal immigration.” The rulers’ attempts to pit workers of different nationalities against one another—Black and Caucasian, native and foreign born, at home and abroad—are an essential part of their drive to weaken working-class solidarity and our capacity to fight back.

One reader mentioned in this issue set a good example of internationalist solidarity by contributing to the Capital Fund of the Socialist Workers Party. She turned over a nationalist “blood money” bribe from the Trade Readjustment Allowances Act—which allocates pittances for workers tossed on the street by the competition of international capital— with a note saying, “Your work is instrumental in leading the working class to power.”

For the bosses, national borders drive exploitation, plunder and war. For workers, internationalism and solidarity open the road to end the capitalists’ class dictatorship.

“The working men have no country” explains the Communist Manifesto, the founding document of the modern communist movement by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. We are all wage slaves. And wage labor, the necessary condition for the existence of the capitalist class, “rests exclusively on competition between the laborers.”

We share a common enemy and common solution: the overthrow of capitalist rule and conquest of power by the working class.

We urge those hungry for solidarity and a course of struggle rooted in the common condition, revolutionary needs and fighting capacity of the working class to use the Militant. Become a long-term reader and help distribute the paper far and wide.
 
 
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Obama’s ‘job gains’ based on antilabor offensive  
 
 
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