Trump and Musk need to get useful jobs, so they will learn how to do meaningful work

Sketch by Kathe Kollwitz

 

By Steve Halpern

Recently Elon Musk sent letters to employees of the federal government. Musk, who heads the miss-named Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), asked those employees to report on what they accomplished in the past week. Musk, threatened workers with termination if they failed to reply to his note.    

Many liberal commentators have argued that this action, as well as many actions of the Administration of President Donald Trump are unprecedented. While we haven't seen Presidential Administrations enact many of Trump's initiatives, the political course of Trump's politics goes back to the government that took power after the so-called American Revolution. 

The United States has its own peculiar history of the capitalist system. Capitalism is different from the feudal system where royal families ruled. With capitalism manufacturing enterprises work with banks and merchant capitalists, who all work with the government. 

Banks only invest money when they feel they can gouge out profits on those investments. This means continual capitalist growth is necessary. However, since capitalists rarely, if ever, actually produce wealth, all wealth must come from the working class. 

So, because there is a continual need for economic growth, capitalists routinely coerce workers to produce more while wages stagnate or deteriorate. This explains why about 70% of the world's population lives on $10 per day or less. This explains why wages have stagnated for workers in this country over the past fifty years. Yet the billionaires of the world have seen their fortunes increase dramatically. So, while politicians promise to make America great again, tens of millions of people in this country do not have enough food to eat.

I used to work in the automotive parts industry. In those days, we were working as fast as we could to meet production goals. Then a corporate officer came to the plant and demanded that we increase the production speed.

I raised my hand and said that one worker had nervous breakdowns and another needed to go home because his blood pressure was 165. However, we did increase the production speed. After about two years, the plant closed and about 2,500 workers saw jobs we worked eliminated. In all, tens of millions of manufacturing jobs were eliminated due to automation or outsourcing. Recently, when I've asked young people if they know anyone who works in a factory, the answer is usually, no.

In his book Half Has Never Been Told—Slavery and the making of American capitalism, Edward E. Baptist documented how slave owners coerced slaves to continually increase the amount of cotton they collected every day. The punishment for failing to meet production quotas consisted of various means of physical torture. Yet, while the slave owners did no work, they argued that the slaves, who did everything, were "lazy and shiftless." 

This profound contradiction was one of the reasons for the Civil War. In all, about 600,000 soldiers died in that war. Then the United States government adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. These Amendments abolished slavery, established "equal protection under the law," as well as the right to vote for all men in this country. Women didn't get the right to vote until 1920.

However, up until the 1960s, all branches of the U.S. government routinely violated these three Amendments. This meant that it took the civil rights movement of the 1960s to get the government to give Black people the same rights they were supposed to be granted by the Constitution.

Today, the Trump Administration is attempting to reverse many of the gains of the civil rights movement. Trump wants to deny students the right to learn the history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. 

However, the history of this country has been a continuous struggle to advance the interests of the working class. We saw this in the labor, civil rights, women's, anti-war, and immigrant rights movements.

Clearly Donald Trump and Elon Musk are both indifferent to this history. They believe that they have a right to spend their lives living off of the labor of the working class, while they do no productive work. 

Then, they have the audacity to claim that they know something about what it means to be efficient. One way to advance efficiency would be to confiscate the wealth of billionaires and use that money to do away with poverty.

Several years ago I wrote a poem titled The President needs to get a real job and learn what it means to earn a living. This poem was about President Clinton, but could also apply to every President in the history of this country. 

As I've argued in this blog, the government in this country has always been about serving the interests of the most affluent. This capitalist class lives of of the labor of working people all over the world. Mass movements and even wars for liberation have been the means for advancing the interests of the working class. In my opinion, these are the lessons working people can learn from to deal with the uncertain and insidious reality we face today.