Vol. 77/No. 6      February 18, 2013

Amid hand wringing over years of high unemployment, no capitalist politician has proposed—let alone done—anything to put more people to work. President Barack Obama’s highly-touted Jobs Commission he set up two years ago met four times and did nothing. Last week the president unceremoniously disbanded it.

These facts point to only one conclusion: The propertied rulers and the elected politicians who represent them don’t want to do anything about the scourge of unemployment, despite what they say.

Under current conditions of declining production and trade, the bosses have no economic interest in boosting employment. As they compete with each other and seek to shore up their declining profit rates, their concern is to drive against the wages, working conditions and overall living standards of working people as much as possible without engendering too much resistance along the way. Persistently high joblessness is helpful in this regard.

The larger the ranks of jobless, the longer periods of their unemployment, the more discouraged and willing to accept pay cuts to be working again, the better. The less confident and combative workers are, the better.

For the same reasons, the Militant and the Socialist Workers Party candidates have been raising the need for working people to fight for a massive government-funded public works program to put millions to work today, building and repairing infrastructure, hospitals, schools and other things workers need. Under the cumulative impact of the current situation, this demand is becoming more and more necessary, not only to alleviate the immediate economic grind, but to strengthen the unity, confidence and fighting capacity of the working class in order to push back the capitalists’ assaults.

It is in this context that the Militant is launching a five-week subscription effort, taking the perspective for the fight for jobs and other political questions of interest to workers door to door across the country—and internationally. We have found more and more working people want to discuss how to confront the social crises bred by the normal workings of capitalism. And more are open to a perspective of decades of class-struggle ahead through which working people will transform themselves, posing the need and possibility of building a revolutionary movement that can fight for political power. We invite you to join in.  

 
 
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3 years of high unemployment: US gov’t won’t act to create jobs
 
 
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