Vol. 76/No. 32      August 27, 2012

One of the most frequent questions James Harris and Maura DeLuca, the Socialist Workers Party candidates for president and vice president, are asked by workers on the picket line is “Why are the bosses going after us so hard?”

Across the country, and around the world, workers face attacks on their wages; jacked-up productivity and longer hours, wearing on life and limb; slashes in health and retirement benefits; demands for ever-deeper divisions between wages for new workers and those with more seniority; increased use of temporary workers at lower pay and no benefits; union busting and assaults on our dignity.

This is not an explosion of greediness among corporate executives. It is a product of the very nature of capitalism.

We are living in the early stages of a worldwide crisis of capitalist accumulation unlike anything since the Great Depression.

Capitalism dominates the world like never before. In the 1930s, most of China, India, Africa and much of Latin America were organized around subsistence peasant farming, isolated from the world market. Today, capitalist relations dominate every corner of the world, drawing millions of toilers into factory production—and into the class struggle.

We do not face a downturn in the “boom and bust’ of the business cycle, but a deep-going, long-term crisis engendered by the bosses’ relentless drive to accumulate more and more profits to plow back into fiercer and fiercer competition with each other. This drives profit margins down, and the struggle escalates. The capitalists desperately need some new markets for investment—but there are none.

The only place they can turn is to take it out of the working class, the class that creates all wealth by our labor. And as their crisis deepens, this is exactly what they are doing.

The crisis intensifies the competition among capitalists on a national and international scale. This is why we see U.S. imperialism working from Africa to the South China Sea to battle their Chinese competitors and to shift its military machine to the East. This is behind the crisis of the European Union, the conflicting class interests of the stronger exploiting classes in Germany, France and the United Kingdom vs. the weaker in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and elsewhere.

The employers seek to draw workers into backing U.S. moves abroad, arguing we all benefit when they clobber their rivals. But we and workers worldwide face exactly the same attacks everywhere, for the same reasons. It is in our interest to fight together.

It is only by coming to understand this reality from our experiences in struggle that we can begin to chart an independent working-class political course of battle, a road toward taking political power and transforming the world.
 
 
Related articles:
Caterpillar strikers say,‘We have to take a stand’
Tens of thousands of autoworkers strike Hyundai in South Korea
W. Virginia Steelworkers strike against concessions
Labor rally in Philadelphia protests attacks on workers
On the Picket Line
Marx: ‘Trade Unions: Their Past, Present, and Future’  
 
 
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