Capitalism is Creating Workers Destitution

Capitalism is Creating Workers Destitution 

 On the wrong side of the tracks--sandwiched between the local airport and the railway line--Tent City was created in the summer of 2007 as a temporary base for Ontario's homeless population, originally around two dozen.

      Following the subprime crimes against homeowners--when millions nationwide lost their homes--some 300 people in the Ontario area have had to move to Tent City because they have nowhere else to go. The conditions are hard-scrabble: no electricity, no plumbing, no drainage. Portable showers offer a chance to wash, but there is nowhere to prepare food, apart from makeshift tables in the open air.

      The diversity of people in Tent City is striking in its range of people: whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, the old and young including some with babies. Ontario is part of what is called the Inland Empire, where the rate of foreclosure is the third highest in the entire U.S. The subprime "displaced" are the minority in Tent City, most of them went to live in the cheap Ontario hotels, pushing out the homeless population. Most residents in Tent City are long-term hard-core homeless people--for whom poverty, hunger, and physical abuse have become a way of life over many years.

      Similar tent cities and hobo shanty towns have sprung up all over America, with destitution staring hundreds of thousands of American workers in the face every day.

   Whole sections of the American working population are being devastated by capitalist "austerity." In Florida's Lake County the number of homeless students has skyrocketed, from 122 in 2005 to more than 2,600 in the 2012 school year. The alarming rise in homeless students in Florida is identical to the rising numbers of homeless students and other worker groups seen nationwide.

      Americans are suffering from a repeat of the 1929 depression with hobo towns, long lines for food handouts at shelters, constant fear of physical abuse, and unremitting unemployment and destitution.    Capitalists claimed they had solved the boom and bust problem--instead, it's clear their whole system is a bust.

Destitution Should Be Causing Workers To Rise Up   

  Capitalist tyrants have wantonly killed over a million Iraqis, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and Sudanese and over 4,000 coalition service personnel, destroyed the minds of laborers worldwide, launched an unending strategy of militaristic imperialism that devastates all nations, created one-party police states, allowed corrupt financial institutions to defraud workers out of billions of dollars through the subprime swindle . . . and yet laborers worldwide are not even now rising up against their murderous oppressors.

      Workers stand still for many kinds of oppression because not every laborer is equally affected, because they're at times involved in corruption themselves, and sometimes because they're not intelligent enough to see what's being done to them. American and coalition military forces are even willing to let themselves be killed for a senseless war-profiteering invasion of Iraq--because when they deploy, their death doesn't seem imminent to them.

      But when capitalist tyrants create world-wide worker destitution--when workers in countries throughout the world find they can't afford food or shelter for themselves and their families--then the workers should begin to wake up and begin to oppose their oppressors and demand changes in their governments! But, unfortunately, there is still almost no opposition to capitalist murder on the part of workers. As one of the homeless students in Florida said: "I'm just waiting for whatever happens next."

   Meanwhile, the capitalists are gaining increased wealth from the grinding of the working poor.

"Goldman Sachs and the rest of Wall Street gambled on food. Their bets paid off big time--at the cost of igniting a food crisis that pushed hundreds of millions into the ranks of the hungry."Alan Maass, Banking on Huger, 8/5/2010

An Interesting Convergence

    Capitalists have begun to gamble on food in the Wall Street Casino, creating mass starvation for workers worldwide. The fact that there were food-related riots in Haiti, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Yemen, Ethiopia, Cameroon, and throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa the same week in April, 2008 that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Group of Seven were meeting in Washington forced World Bank President Robert Zoellick to pretend to address the growing catastrophe. The Group of Seven capitalist high-roller regimes (US, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada) didn't consider a developing world famine worthy of their attention.

      Zoellick issued an "urgent call" to rich nations to help stem rising food prices, warning that social unrest in poor countries is spreading and that 100 million people are at risk of being plunged deeper into poverty. "We have to put our money where our mouth is now, so that we can put food into hungry mouths. It is as stark as that," said Zoellick, as he called for more contributions to the $500 million World Food Program.

"The IMF and World Bank . . . felt compelled to acknowledge the emerging worldwide catastrophe, in part because while these agencies are instruments of the main imperialist powers, they must posture as responsive to the needs of all countries. It would be too revealing for them to focus exclusively on the fate of major finance houses, while ignoring the fact that hundreds of millions across the planet are being threatened with starvation."More decisive, however, is the realization that this crisis confronting the most impoverished countries and poorest sections of the world’s population is threatening to unleash a revolution of the hungry that could topple governments across large parts of the world." 2

      To sustain the pretence by capitalists that they care for the plight of starving workers, President Bush on April 15, 2008 ordered the release of $200 million in emergency aid to alleviate food shortages in Africa and other parts of the world. The White House said the money would be used to meet unanticipated needs for food aid. Bush and the other billionaire cabal members give chump-change as a token gesture of concern for destitute workers--and the world press fails to scream outrage at such hypocrisy and perfidiousness.

      Predatory capitalists, through their World Bank, have had to acknowledge a doubling of worldwide food prices in three years and admit that this could push 100 million more people into destitution or starvation. As we've seen in our studies of the present economic depression, the cannibalization of workers through the subprime mortgage swindle, and the destruction of educational systems worldwide, all these assaults on workers are caused by the built-in, inevitable depravities of predatory capitalism.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired is, in a sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Ridding Ourselves of the Failed Capitalist System      Vulture capitalism, by its very nature of placing profits over all other values, simply cannot meet human needs. Humankind for too long has allowed the murderous system of fascist capitalism to run rampant over the essential needs of workers worldwide. Millions of worker's lives, their very existence, their jobs, the future education and wellbeing of their children, are dominated by the machinations of a runaway system over which they have no control and over which--it turns out--no one has any control.

      One of the main causes of growing worldwide worker destitution is that capitalist speculators have been driven out of stock market and housing investments by the 2000 crash in stocks and bonds and the 2007 collapse in the housing industry--into speculating on food as a mere commodity. Capitalism in its essence treats all natural and human elements--laborers, food, the earth, shelter, etc.--as nothing more than quantifiable, exploitable "things" in their profit and loss calculations. Never mind that human life depends on water, food, clothing, and shelter--these elements must be reduced to mere items within the mindless, cold-blooded calculus of commerce--whatever the consequences for laborers.

      Workers worldwide must wake up to the stark fact that the people depicted in the image to the left (among many others) are amassing (or have amassed) billions in private fortunes while laborers are dying of starvation, losing their jobs and homes, and being killed in war-profiteering battles.

      Throughout the world, laborers must awaken to the fact that they are, whether they enjoy facing it or not, engaged in national civil wars for their very lives against predator capitalists who are murdering them every day.

Some of the other reasons people are starving is that cannibalistic capitalists have contrived for:

Oil prices to triple during the last four years, impacting food production and transportation costsBio-fuel feedstock (corn and other grains) to be taken from the food supply to create ethanol: the drive to produce ethanol has contributed to a doubling in the price of corn in two yearsFood to be traded as a commodity on world stock markets--no matter the consequences for starving people: the price of wheat jumping 120% in a year, resulting in the price of bread doubling in many poor countriesSeeds to be genetically manipulated so they cannot reproduce, requiring new purchase of seeds from capitalist predatorsOver 3 trillion dollars to be given to members of the cabal through the Afghanistan and Iraq wars--primarily through war-profiteeringThe purchasing power of the dollar to decrease by approximately eighty percent over the last decade, because of, among other reasons, the Fed giving $1 trillion of taxpayer money to criminal financial institutions defrauding workers

"The American public may justifiably be puzzled by how the government can seem to come up with trillions of dollars for foreign wars and banker bailouts, but so little for them. The United States is spending an estimated $3 trillion for an illegal war that has made us less safe, and $1 trillion so far to rescue bankers in a way that is destabilizing the economy. But it can't seem to secure health care or retirement security for all Americans."Michael Hudson 3   "A Trillion Dollar Rescue for Wall Street Gamblers"      The revolutionary implications of the crises caused by escalating food-prices, loss of homes and jobs, and fascist bailouts of big banks are beginning to dawn on workers worldwide--as well as a few persons within the ruling establishment itself.

      In an article published April 7, 2008, Time magazine noted: "The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War...  And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world."

      Most cabal propagandists claim that they're defusing the latest food crisis just as they covered over the 1987 stock market collapse, the 1997-98 Asian crisis, the 1998 bankruptcy of Long Term Capital Management, the 2000 collapse of the share market and dot.com bubble, and the 2007 bursting of the housing bubble and subprime lending scandal.

      However, a few within the ruling stratum are expressing some concern over the possible revolutionary potential of workers. A 2007 new report from the UK Defense Ministry’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre warned what might happen by 2035.

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat . . . Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest."

"The rich are tolerable only so long as their gains appear to bear some relation to roughly what they have contributed to society."John Maynard Keynes

What Must Be Done   

       The sharpening crises of death, hunger and destitution caused by government incompetence and indifference, imperialist wars, escalating food-prices, and loss of jobs and homes, since they impact the lives of workers in such an immediate and obvious life-or-death manner, are moving us toward the beginning of the end for fascist capitalism.      Less-developed countries are not the only scenes of capitalism deliberately causing destitution; Americans have already experienced it in such assaults on workers as in New Orleans and nationwide in the subprime crimes.

A brilliantly prescient Abraham Lincoln foresaw this revolutionary time we're now experiencing.

"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its REIGN by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."President Abraham Lincoln after the National Banking Act of 1863 was passed

      Our commonwealth movement to replace fascist capitalism must be carefully thought through and skillfully carried out, considering all scenarios, including planning for multiple contingencies. We must be ready for the possibility that the cabal will reproduce the history of 1930s Germany down to the hyper-inflationary crisis which brought financial ruin to hundreds of thousands of Germans and ushered in the deadly Nazi regime. The present capitalist destruction of workers through the subprime crimes and inflation brought on by the bailout of major financial institutions--leading to increase in food prices and the resulting worker destitution--are very similar to the situation in 1930s Germany.

      Capitalist devastation of workers is becoming inescapable and ever more immediate in its effects. No one can for long overlook such personally devastating experiences as waking up to the insanity of the Iraq war when your loved one has been murdered for nothing, losing your home and your job, or suffering from hunger and destitution and realizing it's because of capitalist inflation of food prices.

      Many of us have been wondering for some time how long it would take workers worldwide to wake up to their own destruction at the hands of cannibalistic capitalists. Now we're beginning to see the answer. The stark reality of their own genocide is beginning to radicalize the working class into a revolutionary force. An immense leap in consciousness is taking place and murderous tyrants are being opposed and overthrown.

      We mustn't delude ourselves into seeing the recent ousting of a Haitian tyrant or worldwide riots and demonstrations as fundamental solutions to the problems we face--even though we can certainly celebrate them as harbingers of worker revolutionary determination. Fascist capitalism must not be tinkered with, it must be done away with root and branch, so political-economic systems working for the good of all can be implemented. Capitalists are good at offering palliatives as genuine solutions and trying to convince the masses that their crises are in fact merely glitches in an otherwise perfect political-economic system.

      Over many decades capitalism has pretended to reform itself, one of the most recent being the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which was touted by Bush when he signed it into law on July 30, 2002 as: "the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt." Sarbanes-Oxley has not been applied and now Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is seeking to lessen, not increase, oversight of the financial system, claiming that tighter U.S. regulations have disadvantaged Wall Street in relation to the London stockmarket. "Voluntary Regulation" is always the dodge capitalists offer when their financial crises become too evident to hide.

      Fascist capitalists will not silently fold up their tents and fade silently and peacefully away into historic oblivion; they are inherently barbarous and savage and will probably take as much of world with them as they can in their inevitable demise. That's why revolutionary means--albeit peaceful--will be necessary to bring about a commonwealth system for human fulfillment--a total reconstitution of social structures will be necessary.

      Capitalists and their fellow-travelers will attempt to befuddle unthinking people by using their old argument that workers movements for social change have been tried and proven unworkable--as in the failed communist experiment in the Soviet Union and in British and European socialist fiascoes. The Soviet Union, after the first brief months of worker control under the leadership of persons like Trotsky, became an absolute dictatorship under Stalin. British and European "socialism" was merely a bit of state control cobbled onto a capitalist economic system. A commonwealth system for the benefit of all citizens, as outlined by Plato, has never been tried, so it's a false argument to say that such a progressive mandate is useless or specious.

      One of the most absurd arguments for capitalism in the face of current economic corruption and devastation is Ron Paul's claim that "capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven't had capitalism." 

"To condemn free-market capitalism because of anything going on today makes no sense. There is no evidence that capitalism exists today. We are deeply involved in an interventionist-planned economy that allows major benefits to accrue to the politically connected of both political spectrums. One may condemn the fraud and the current system, but it must be called by its proper names – Keynesian inflationism, interventionism, and corporatism."

      Evidently, Ron Paul's "capitalism" refers to some hypothetical chimera from the brain of Adam Smith or Ayn Rand, not what capitalist practice has been. He speaks of "the natural restraints placed on market excesses that capitalism and sound markets impose." Whether Paul or others want to believe it, there is no mystical "invisible hand of the marketplace" that mechanically, automatically redounds to the benefit of all persons within a nation. Capitalism in practice, since its inception, has caused worker destitution.On Dec. 23, 2007, Ron Paul appeared on "Meet the Press," where he asserted he would not have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because it impinged on the property rights of business owners.      If the reader wishes to examine some of the other specious dodges capitalists use to try to prop up their ruined racket, illustrative questions and answers are provided here.

      Using nonworkability as a criterion, the most devastating failed system in the world is fascist capitalism, deadly and destructive in every way possible--as this essay makes patently evident. Our job is to get rid of the capitalist system that is not only ineffectual but murderous.

"New social forms that will be the basis of being will not arise without many designs, models, studies, and experiments that begin to bridge the gap between what is necessary and what is possible. This will eventually amount to large-scale, long-run planning and to short-term proposals for first steps." 4

      American peaceful revolutionaries must work toward long-term, substantive, reconstitution of American institutions. Our efforts must be directed toward assisting workers worldwide--not just in the U.S.--to awaken to their plight and begin to take back their political, economic, educational, healthcare, and communication structures and agencies. The achievement of critical consciousness on the part of workers worldwide must be utilized in planning for a world commonwealth system and carrying out those plans in perceptible ways, creating a new culture of human fulfillment.

      In the face of monolithic capitalistic power used to annihilate people, institutions, and the earth, we take a historical view of world conditions, succumbing to neither facile optimism nor fatalistic pessimism. Our more comprehensive view allows us to discern that capitalism itself has set up conditions for establishment of a progressive social system.

"Capitalist society, as well as sacrificing everything to the pursuit of profit and competition has also, inadvertently, produced the elements for its destruction as a mode of exploitation. It has created the potential technological and cultural means for a unified and planned world system of production attuned to the needs of human beings and nature. It has produced a class . . . that has no need for national or competitive prejudices, and every interest in developing international solidarity. The working class has no interest in the rapacious desire for profit. In other words capitalism has laid the basis for a higher order of society, for its supercession by socialism. Capitalism is showing itself capable of destroying human society, but it has also created its own grave digger, the working class, that can preserve human society and raise it to new levels." 5      In helping to build critical consciousness within workers, we must understand the deeper aspects of the demented relationship patterns established by predatory capitalism.

The Derangement of Political-Economic Relationships 

    In today's world, the relationships that go to make up the essence of a human being have been completely perverted and twisted by the vulture capitalism structure of economic exploitation of workers by owners of the means of production (capitalists).

      The very fact that a person is alive should mean that he has the right to life, liberty, health, and employment. As viewers of Michael Moore's movie "Sicko" have learned, most other Western nations provide health benefits to their citizens as a matter of course, whereas people in the cabal-dominated United States not only lack health care but also suffer from globalization-induced unemployment and the ongoing destruction of our Constitutional liberties.

"A new society is possible only if, in the process of developing it, a new human being also develops, or in more modest terms, if a fundamental change occurs in contemporary Man's character structure."Erich Fromm, To Have Or To Be?

Relationships As the Front Line of the "Revolutionary Struggle"      The real front line of "revolutionary struggle" for a commonwealth where "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" is complete revision of our patterns of relationship--interpersonal and cultural. Most people in today's world are "relationship cripples," totally incapable of initiating or sustaining even a single reciprocally satisfying and fulfilling relationship. We could not hope to create a genuine commonwealth until we've created persons who are capable of genuine reciprocity, cooperation, and consensus.

      A culture is essentially a consensual reality created by the interpersonal relations human beings establish with one another through ritualized practices and agreed principles. Earlier in the history of the United States we lived somewhat under practices and principles of personal integrity, rule of law not men, and some degree of rule of the people through their elected representative. Prior to and following the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a criminal cabal has systematically destroyed all those rational, positive ordering structures and replaced them with a criminal, totalitarian police state.

"When the forms of production come into conflict with existing social relations, a revolutionary epoch arises. But these objective contradictions must find their way into the consciousness of people. People have to begin thinking about revolution. they have to want revolution and believe that revolution is a viable option. They have to feel not only the need, but also the possibility of fundamental social change . . . The present crisis will provide an impulse for significant and progressive shifts in social consciousness." 6

      Part of what will constitute the "new man" is the clear realization that the current economic and political relationships--the structures of power and control--are not part of the fabric of reality but man-made contrivances. Over the centuries, capitalism and dictatorial political-economic rule have been made to appear as the outcome of natural laws, the only possible ways in which humans could order society. Two pernicious dogmas accompany this false view of human life:

"The suffering of the workers as well as the destruction of an ever-increasing number of smaller enterprises for the sake of the growth of ever larger corporations was an economic necessity that one might regret, but that one had to accept as if it were the outcome of a natural law." 7"The very qualities that the system required of human beings--egotism, selfishness, and greed--were innate in human nature; hence, not only the system but human nature itself fostered them." 8      We create the "new man" by helping people worldwide to realize that capitalism and dictatorial rule fashion humans in the debased pattern of egomaniacs: persons exclusively driven by self-interest and greed.

"To be an egoist refers not only to my behavior but to my character. It means: that I want everything for myself; that possessing, not sharing, gives me pleasure; that I must become greedy because if my aim is having, I am more the more I have; that I must feel antagonistic toward all others: my customers whom I want to deceive, my competitors whom I want to destroy, my workers whom I want to exploit. I can never be satisfied, because there is no end to my wishes; I must be envious of those who have more and afraid of those who have less."Erich Fromm, To Have Or To Be?

      Through the destitution caused by a totally shattered, bankrupt capitalist "system," workers worldwide have gained increased critical consciousness and radicalized revolutionary determination. Now we must set about creating a new political-economic-cultural system for human fulfillment: a redistribution of wealth, democratization of the workplace, and state control over industry and finance, among other essential features.

Arise ye prisoners of starvationArise ye wretched of the earthFor justice thunders condemnation`Tis a better world in birth.No more traditions' chains shall bind usArise ye slaves, no more in thrallThe earth shall rise on new foundationsWe have been naught, we shall be all.

Tis the final conflictlet each stand in his placethe international working classshall be the human race.

Notes:1 In response to the food crisis in Haiti, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has agreed to send 364 tons of food, including chicken, milk and lentils.

2 Bill Van Auken, "Amid mounting food crisis, governments fear revolution of the hungry," World Socialist Web Site, 15 April 2008

3 Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation). In 1990 he helped establish the world's first sovereign debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich's Chief Economic Advisor.

4 Erich Fromm, To Have Or To Be?, p. 161

5 World Revolution, no. 304, May 2007

6 David North, The Crisis of American Democracy

7 Erich Fromm, Op. Cit., p. xxix

8 Ibid.