Auto Production, Supermarkets, Fast Food, and Ghost Cities

Recently I visited a new supermarket in the vicinity of where I live in Philadelphia.  This supermarket is also located on the outskirts of the North Philadelphia, which is a largely Black working class community.  There hasn’t been a large market in this area for quite a while, making shopping for food a bit more convenient for many people.  However, my co-worker claims that the prices at this store aren’t any better than the average.

When I was in high school, I worked in a supermarket and learned that the prices and the expiration dates were better in the suburban stores.  This is because there are more stores in the suburbs and the people who live in these areas have the resources to shop around.

The reason why I was interested in this store is because I worked in an auto factory across the street for twelve years.  Next to the supermarket is a fast food restaurant.  Both these stores are located in what used to be the parking lot for the auto factory.  The former auto factory has been abandoned for about ten years.

Auto production in the U.S.A.

When this plant was open, every ten to fifteen minutes an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer would deliver huge rolls of sheet metal.  Another tractor-trailer would take away the finished auto parts.  This continued twenty-four hours per day seven days per week.

This factory was over seventy-five years old and it was originally built with rail lines running through the plant.  Rail cars also transported finished auto parts, as well as the scrap metal generated from the plant.  The rail transport was more fuel-efficient and required fewer workers than transport by tractor-trailer.

The reason why corporations prefer transport by tractor-trailer is because auto production is overall more profitable than rail.  This is why corporations teemed up with politicians to build highways.  This is one of the main reasons why there is a fuel shortage in the world.  This is also one of the reasons why about 40,000 people die every year in auto related accidents in the United States.

The company was obsessed with producing the maximum number of auto parts.  I remember one day hurrying to the bathroom, and this took only about two minutes.  When I returned to the line the leader screamed at me for leaving my post.  Another time, I hesitated at my job for about three seconds.  A co-worker then started to scream at me to get the line running.

Jobs in the plant were potentially dangerous.  Some workers lost their lives, others lost their limbs, their hearing, or developed carpal tunnel syndrome.  I was lucky not to have had any lasting injuries.

When the U.S. auto manufacturers lost about 25% of their market to their Japanese competitors, they understood that changes needed to be made.  As a result, the company required us to improve quality and increase production. 

It is impossible to describe in print the seemingly super-human effort the workers gave to accomplish these tasks.  The company rewarded us awards and jackets for meeting these goals.  Then, they closed down the plant.                         

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the reason for the plant closure was “excess capacity.”  This means that the auto industry has more production facilities than they needed.  What the editors at The Inquirer didn’t understand is that this story was not exactly news.

In the year 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote a pamphlet titled: The Communist Manifesto.  Almost one hundred fifty years before the closing of this factory, Marx and Engels gave the following reason for why corporations close factories:

“In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction.”

In other words, when the Native Americans gathered more food than they needed they had a party and celebrated.  In the so-called civilized atmosphere of capitalism, where the government argues there is, “liberty and justice for all,” corporations throw workers in the street, like used garbage, when there is “excess capacity.”

Many jobs went to China

For many of my years at this factory, I worked in the tool and die department.  I completed an apprenticeship in this trade sponsored by the union and the company. 

Auto dies transform flat pieces of steel into usable auto parts.  Although this trade is essential to all manufacturing, tool and die making has been in decline in the U.S. for many years.

One day when I was working in that department, I came across a magazine that had an article about the trade of tool and die in Hong Kong.  The article stated that in Hong Kong students had to apply for training in this trade, and if accepted, they needed to pay for that training.  However, all graduates were offered jobs in the trade, and worked with the most sophisticated machinery.

This article underscored the point that much of the manufacturing in the world has been transported to China.  Why did this happen?

Chinese ghost cities

The Chinese Revolution transformed China from a nation that was ravaged by imperial powers into a nation that would stand on its own.  This enabled the government to make substantial investments in infrastructure and today China is leads the world in the construction of rail lines.

However, the so-called Chinese communists decided to allow for widespread capitalist development in their country.  A recent story on the news program 60 Minutes took a look at the results of these policies.

Today there are several cities in China with miles and miles of skyscrapers that are completely abandoned.  This is in the most populous nation in the world.

The Chinese are an extremely industrious and inventive people.  The government forced many residents to leave their homes to make way for the construction of these ghost towns.  Many former residents of these cities actually collected the bricks from their former homes so they might use those bricks in another location.

The problem with these ghost towns is that they have been sold to speculators as investment properties.  Most Chinese, like many workers in the United States, can not afford the costs of new construction.         

What do working people need and want?

Understanding these facts we might consider the question of: What do working people around the world need and want.  In my opinion, this would include about eight basic goods and services including: food, clothing, housing, health care, education, transportation, communications, and exposure to cultural activities like music, art, films, theater, dance, sports, etc…

We might consider this when listening to Zhang Xin, a woman who happens to be one of China’s new billionaires.  Xin, who used to work for Goldman Sachs, is in the business of profiting off of the construction of numerous luxury office buildings in China. 

Understanding what working people want and need, we might also argue that these goods and services rarely, if ever, are produced in office buildings.  Yet, Zhan Xin argues that while the market for useful housing has dried up, the market for office buildings continues to be healthy.  In other words, one of the reasons why working people in China and the United States are not able to afford new homes, is because the price of this new housing includes the cost of almost useless office buildings.

Conclusion

The cause for the closing auto factories is essentially the same as the building of ghost towns in China.  This is what Marx and Engels called “the disease of overproduction.”  What can we do about this?

We might consider the concluding words of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:

“The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains.  They have a world to win.

Workingmen (and women, my addition) of all countries unite.”      

James Baldwin & The Fruitvale Station

Recently I viewed the film, Fruitvale Station, produced by Ryan Coogler.  This film is a docudrama of the criminal police murder of Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale train station in Oakland, California in 2009.  The film effectively portrays Oscar Grant as a young Black man who loved his family and usually had positive interactions with those who met him.

The Fruitvale Station

Like many young people today, Grant had difficulty finding and then holding a job.  At one point in his life he sold drugs and served time for that offence.  However, before his murder he decided to stop selling drugs and to do his best to find a job.

When Grant was in prison he gravitated to Black men who were also doing time.  This made him a target of Caucasian gang members.  On his way home from a New Years Eve celebration he encountered one of the Caucasian gang members and there was a fight.

The film then showed how the police intervened in this fight in order to come to the aid of the Caucasian gang members.  In other words, the police only detained Oscar Grant and his African American friends for fighting on the train.  The police murdered Oscar Grant while they came to the aid of a Caucasian gang.

Allen Iverson, who was an all-star player in the National Basketball Association had a similar experience as Oscar Grant.  When Iverson was in high school in Virginia he was in a fight in a bowling alley with young men who happened to be Caucasian. 

Iverson and his Black friends were arrested for this fight and he served four months in prison for this so-called offense.  Iverson eventually received clemency from the Governor of Virginia.  An appellate court also dismissed all the charges against Iverson.  Ironically, the law that initially convicted Iverson was designed to protect people against lynchings.

I wasn’t especially interested in seeing the film Fruitvale Station.  We know of the extreme brutality of the capitalist system and I wasn’t intrigued about seeing one more example of this criminal brutality. 

Take This Hammer

After seeing the film I didn’t think about doing a review for this same reason.  Then, I received a link to a documentary by James Baldwin titled Take This Hammer produced by KQED television.  This film is about Baldwin’s interviews and thoughts about the city of San Francisco in the year 1963.  Thinking about Baldwin’s narrative in 1963 gave me a compelling perspective to the film, Fruitvale Station.

James Baldwin was in no way interested in the typical tourist spots in San Francisco, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Fisherman’s Warf.  No, Baldwin was interested in the Black community in the city that reminded him of the place where he was raised in Harlem, New York City.  In his interviews, Baldwin found that the Black community of San Francisco faced the same problems as Blacks in Harlem.  This is how one person described those conditions.

“Let me tell you about San Francisco.  The white man is not taking advantage of you in public like they doing down in Birmingham.  But he’s killing you with that pencil and paper, brother.  When you go and look for a job, can you get a job?”

Baldwin learned that one of the only jobs available to Blacks was to tear down the homes they lived in.  In one scene, Baldwin stood outside an unfinished housing project.  Understanding the racist character of this country, Baldwin argued that the seeds for the destruction of this project were in place even before the building was completed. 

We might recall that Baldwin made these remarks in 1963.  A recent article in the San Francisco Examiner reported that there was a 37% drop in the city’s Black population from 1990 to 2010.  Even in Oakland, the city with the second highest Black population in the state, the African American population is declining.

Another issue that Baldwin looked at was police brutality.  The San Francisco police arrested one person he spoke to at the age of eight.  The New York City police didn’t harass Baldwin until he was ten years old.  He described two of his experiences with the police in the following passage:

“I was thirteen and was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to the Forty-second Street library, and the cop in the middle of the street muttered as I passed him, ‘Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?’  When I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem’s empty lots.”

There have been many changes in this country since 1963.  Jim Crow isn’t the law of the land.  Many Blacks have managed to attain a college education.  A Black man happens to be the President of the United States.  However, the problem of unemployment might even be worse than it was in 1963.  The murder of Oscar Grant demonstrates that the brutality of the police department is no different from that same brutality half a century ago.

I will conclude with another quotation from James Baldwin taken from his wonderful book The Price of the Ticket:

“Power, then, which can have no morality itself, is yet dependent on human energy, on the wills and desires of human beings.  When power translates itself into tyranny, it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt.  When this happens, and it is happening now, power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities––and seas of blood.  The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything.  They do not know the precise shape of the future, but they know that the future belongs to them.  They realize this––paradoxically––by the failure of the moral energy of their oppressors and begin, almost instinctively, to forge a new morality, to create the principals on which a new world will be built.”    

           

You can view Baldwin’s documentary Take This Hammer at the following web page:

http://sfist.com/2013/08/02/video_james_baldwin_in_the_bayview.php

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & the war against the working class

The other evening I viewed the so-called news program 60 Minutes.  One of their featured stories was of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  This story, narrated by Charlie Rose, attempted to paint this foundation as a group of people who came down from the heavens to save the human race. 

William Gates spoke about how he has a timetable for curing several diseases that especially effect people who live in abject poverty.  Gates is also interested in financing programs to educate people who, he claims, would not have this opportunity without his foundation.  How could there be anything wrong with these initiatives?

What is wrong with the Gates Foundation?

First, we must understand that William Gates is a billionaire.  He also has received funding from Warren Buffet who also is a billionaire.  The question to be asked is: How did these individuals attain the obscene amounts of money they possess, while forty percent of the world’s population lives of two dollars per day or less?

First, we might look at some facts.  For the past thirty years the standard of living in this country has been deteriorating.  Literally hundreds of millions of jobs have been eliminated, and the replacement jobs usually pay less.  While computers and robots have advanced technology, these advances have also eliminated jobs. 

All of this has meant that most working people need to work more hours for effectively less pay.  The increased cost of, health care, education, transportation, and housing, have outstripped the so-called wage increases of workers.           

As a part of this war against working people, there is discrimination against Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, immigrants, and women.  By paying these people less than white men, capitalists like Gates and Buffet can reap enormous profits. 

We don’t need to look at individual examples of people who were discriminated against by these employers to verify this statement.  In order for these men to derive any profits they needed investors.  Those investors have profited from many years of workers toiling under horrendous and discriminatory conditions.

Today, many of the investors of the world have moved their factories to nations where wages might hover around two dollars per day.  In other words, while William Gates claims he is helping the poor people in the world, he has also reaped enormous profits from many of those same people.

Today thousands of workers who toil in China in the Computer industry might have an age of less than eighteen, working sixty hours per week, with forced overtime.

We might also understand that by setting up a charitable trust fund, Gates is allowed to keep much of the money he would have had to pay in taxes.  This means that, while cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit are closing schools and cutting pensions, William Gates is sitting in rooms thinking about how to spend billions of dollars.

I will not deny that this foundation has given people opportunities they would not have had otherwise.  The problem is that the overall standard of living in the world continues to deteriorate.  Profits that have been derived from these billionaires also help to drive down the standard of living.

The foundation doesn’t support these causes

We might consider the organizations that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will not contribute to.  Clearly they do not contribute to unions that attempt to make life better for workers.  In order to make life better for workers, unions need to demand that corporations reap less in terms of profits.  This is why the so-called nonprofit organizations never, to my knowledge, aid unions.  In fact, the so-called nonprofit organizations exist because they receive funding from highly profitable corporations.       

Clearly this foundation does not contribute to the Cuban government that is giving real aid to the less developed nations in the world.

In fact, Cuba has sent tens of thousands of doctors to nations that have little or no health care systems.  In fact, Cuba has trained tens of thousands of doctors, from around the world, free of charge.

     

No doubt, some of the money that financed William Gates’ Microsoft Corporation, might have come from profits derived on the island of Cuba before the revolution.  In those days, working people in Cuba relied on sugar production and lacked work for most of the year.  One of the other jobs for many Cuban women was prostitution. 

While there continues to be many problems in Cuba, this nation has gone through a complete transformation.  Cuba today has more teachers and doctors per capita than any other nation in the world.  Infant mortality in Cuba is about half of what it is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  The percentage of people in Cuba with HIV/AIDS is about one-sixth of what it is in this country.

With this record, we might ask a legitimate question as to why the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation isn’t giving money to the Cuban government.  I believe a strong case can be made for the argument that today Cuba is doing more to improve health care in the world than any other source.

Clearly this foundation isn’t giving money to free Mumia Abu Jamal or Leonard Peltier who have won international support of their freedom from the prisons in this country.  We might also mention the five Cubans who are also held in US prisons for working to end U.S. sponsored terrorism against their homeland.  No, this so-called wonderful foundation isn’t supporting any of these causes.

Living in denial

In the so-called news story about this foundation we learn that William Gates is an avid reader.  While Gates might read many books, he lives in denial of a fact established hundreds of years ago.

John Locke was a philosopher who argued that: “All wealth is the product of labor.”  This means that working people and farmers produce all the wealth in the world.  The food we eat, the cars we ride in, the clothes we wear, are all produced by working people.  The capitalist system takes that wealth and allows a tiny percentage of the population to control it.

In other words, William Gates never created any jobs.  While he ran a company that manufactured computer software, his primary goal was profits.  Working people are the ones who created all the wealth Gates will ever have.

Because Gates refuses to recognize these facts, he actually believes that the obscene amount of wealth he has will benefit humanity.  He also refuses to look at the fact that while he gives away billions of dollars the standard of living in the world continues to deteriorate.      

No, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation doesn’t represent a solution to our problems.  Charitable organizations have been around for a long time, and the standard of living continues to deteriorate.  Only when working people mobilize to make this a world where we are treated with the respect and dignity we deserve, will we be able to liberate ourselves from the likes of William Gates.

How might we respond to the murder of Trayvon Martin?

I attended a demonstration last week of people who were appalled at the Florida court decision that found the murderer of Trayvon Martin not guilty.  Clearly George Zimmerman stalked Martin and Trayvon made a phone call where he said he felt threatened by Zimmerman.  Clearly Zimmerman would not have stalked Martin if he was white.  Yet the judge in this case did not allow the issue of race to be mentioned in the trial.

Zimmerman claimed that he acted in self-defense.  However, in order to shoot Trayvon, he needed to take his gun out of the holster and release the safety.  This would have been extremely difficult if he acted in self-defense.  A police officer specifically told Zimmerman not to stalk Trayvon.  In other words, Zimmerman was a vigilante who had his gun out and cocked as he approached Trayvon.  This is clear evidence of premeditated murder.  

District Attorneys normally don’t have much trouble in sending people to prison.  In fact, anyone who lives in this country has a better chance of going to prison than citizens in any other nation in the world.  Black people are grossly over-represented in prison, and the Supreme Court has stated in their decision of McCleskey v. Kemp that they don’t have much problem with this.  Understanding this reality, we can see why so many people have been appalled when the world heard the verdict of not guilty in the murder case against George Zimmerman.

The proposals of how to respond

There have been several proposals as to how to respond to this appalling verdict.  Some people are organizing to repeal the Stand-Your-Ground laws.  These laws make it easier for vigilantes to take the law into their own hands and murder people like Trayvon Martin.

While I would applaud the rescinding of these laws, this will not solve the problems we face.  Police officers murdered Shawn Bell with fifty shots and they were found not guilty.  Police officers murdered Amadu Dialo with forty-one shots and they were found not guilty.  Police officers were filmed viciously beating Rodney King and they were found not guilty.  The repeal of the Stand-Your-Ground laws would not stop the murder of unarmed Black men by police officers.

There are people who demand that Attorney General Eric Holder charge Zimmerman with the hate crime of murdering Trayvon Martin because he was Black.  I would also support this course, but first we might consider the question: Who is Eric Holder?

Before Holder became Attorney General he worked for the law firm Covington & Burling.  Holder represented the corporation Chiquita Brands International.  Chiquita admitted to financing a terrorist organization known as the United Self Defense Forces of Columbia.  Holder brokered a deal where Chiquita paid out $25 million to make up for their support of these murderers. 

The estimate is that this organization murdered about 4,000 people.  Some of the people who this organization murdered attempted to improve the working conditions of banana workers who toiled for Chiquita.

I believe we might keep this in mind when thinking that Attorney General Eric Holder will in any way be interested in a meaningful interpretation of the word justice.  What can we expect from someone who takes money to defend the financiers of mass murderers?

Then, there are people who are working to boycott the state of Florida where the acquittal of Zimmerman took place.  Here we might learn from the words of Malcolm X who lived at a time of Jim Crow segregation.

Malcolm argued to: “Stop talking about the South.  If you’re south of Canada you’re in the South.”

Malcolm also argued against appealing to the federal government to enforce their civil rights laws.  Instead, he proposed appealing to the World Court to place the United States government on trial for human rights violations against the millions of Black people who live in this country.

So, the question continues to be: How do we respond to the murder of Trayvon Martin?  In order to begin to answer this question, we need to look at a bit of history.

Nat Truner, Denmark Vessey, and John Brown

Denmark Vessey and Nat Turner both organized slave rebellions.  State authorities organized their executions as well as the executions of their followers.

Even the Supreme Court in this country ruled in its Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, that they felt slaves were not human beings entitled to rights under the law.

John Brown organized an attack on a garrison at Harpers Ferry in Virginia.  This armed uprising attempted to capture arms that would be used to free slaves.  The uprising was defeated and Robert E. Lee was one of the commanding officers that captured John Brown and his followers.  Like Nat Turner and Denmark Vessey, the government ordered John Brown and his followers to be executed by hanging.

 

John Brown didn’t anticipate the fact that in just a few years millions of union soldiers would be mobilized to militarily defeat the slave owners.  In the end, it was Robert E. Lee that surrendered the Confederate army at the Appomatox Court House in Virginia.

After the Civil War, Reconstruction Governments emerged in the former Confederate states.  These governments were the most democratic in the history of this country.  For the first time, former slaves as well as poor whites learned how to read and there were many other progressive reforms.

Then, in 1877 the Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the union army to leave the former Confederate states.  This prompted a counter-revolutionary movement organized by forces that became the Ku Klux Klan.  New governments that enforced Jim Crow segregation replaced the Reconstruction governments.  The Supreme Court, in effect, reversed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution with their Plessey v. Ferguson decision.

All of this meant that while the Civil War ended slavery, Black people, in effect, lost citizenship rights in this country.  One of the effects of these events was that racist mobs murdered thousands of Black people, and the government almost never did anything about it. 

Ida Wells

Ida Wells was a Black journalist who investigated 728 lynchings in this country.   At the time, many prominent people argued that while these lynchings were wrong, Black men had a tendency to rape white women.  Ida Wells discovered that in one third of these lynchings Black men were not even accused of rape.  In fact, in many cases it was the white women who had pursued Black men.  On the other hand, Wells discovered that there was a long history of white men who raped Black women, where the government never prosecuted the rapists.

As a result of this rein of terror, Ida Wells encouraged Black people to leave her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee.  Wells also advised Black people that: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every home.”  “When the white man .  .  .knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have a greater respect for Afro-American life.”   

The lynching of Claude Neal

Claude Neal was one of the Black men who was lynched in the state of Florida in 1934.  About 10,000 people attended this lynching.  The authorities understood that mobs were forming to lynch Neal.  A judge ordered Neal to be sent to a jail in Alabama to await a trial.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan went to Alabama, attacked the jail, kidnapped Neal, and returned him to Florida to face a lynching.  This lynching was advertised in the local newspapers.

A letter writing campaign was organized to appeal to President Franklyn Roosevelt to intervene to stop this lynching.  Several federal laws had been broken and Roosevelt had taken an oath to enforce the laws of this country.  However, Roosevelt was a Democrat who received support from Jim Crow politicians and refused to intervene to stop the lynching of Claude Neal, or to arrest his murderers.  Roosevelt would also refuse to support legislation specifically designed to stop lynchings in this country.

The lynching of Emmit Till and the civil rights movement

When racists lynched Emmitt Till the time had come for people to mobilize to put an end to the madness of Jim Crow segregation.  First came the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  This was followed by thousands Black people who would rather go to jail, than continue to submit to the laws denying them citizenship rights in this country.

Robert F. Williams was a veteran of the Korean War who lived in Monroe, North Carolina.  Williams organized a chapter of the National Rifle Association in Monroe to defend Black people in that city against the mob violence of the Ku Klux Klan.

The government eventually forced Williams to leave this country.  However, his organization, as well as those who supported Malcolm X, demonstrated that if the government was not going to end Jim Crow, Black people would defend themselves “by any means necessary.”

Conclusion

Martin Robinson Delany was a nationalist and an abolitionist who worked in the Reconstruction governments after the Civil War.  At that time, the dominant point of view was that the Civil War had “freed” the former slaves.  Delany argued that:

A people, to be free, must necessarily be their own rulers: that is, each individual must, in himself embody the essential ingredient—so to speak—of the sovereign principal which composes the true basis of his liberty.”     

     

Ever since the Civil War, there has been a basic question that I believe we need to answer.  Back people have toiled to produce much of the wealth in this country.  While this is clearly true, do Black people have full citizenship rights in the United States of America?  When the murderer of Trayvon Martin was found not guilty, we might ask: If Trayvon Martin had citizenship rights in this country, wouldn’t his murderer have gone to prison for this crime?

For the last thirty years working people have experienced a deterioration in our standard of living.  Black people have experienced the brunt of the cutbacks.  There has been clear discrimination in education, health care, housing, salaries, as well as access to loans.  Hundreds of thousands of people are being stopped and frisked.  The overwhelming majority of those stopped and frisked are Black.  The murder of Trayvon Martin begs the question as to whether Black people have the right to live free of vigilante hoodlums.

The history of this country gives us a clear vision as to how we need to respond to the murder of Trayvon Martin.  We need to organize a mass movement that demands human dignity for all.  This movement would state clearly that human needs are more important than profits.  This movement would also look at history and state clearly that the only way to solve the enormous problems we face is with a workers and farmers government.  In my opinion, this would be the best way to respond to the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Economics 101

Today, the people of the world face numerous seemingly unsolvable problems.  There is widespread poverty, destruction of the environment as well as war and discrimination. 

Many people have opinions as to the causes of these problems.  Some argue that greedy people are the cause of many of the problems we face.  Clearly, when we look at the gross disparity of wealth in the world, greed clearly plays a factor.

There are two basic problems with this point of view.  First, some would argue that, if only the people who have power were less greedy, we would be better off.  Then, they argue that greed is a part of the human condition and this means that the problems of the world are inevitable.

A more realistic explanation to the cause of the problems we face comes from the political economic system known as capitalism.  We will not find this point of view in the pro-capitalist news media or on the university campuses.  This is because corporations fund news media as well as universities and they do not hold kindly to criticism.

So, this column will look at the history of capitalism to show how the natural functioning of this system created the enormous problems we face today.  Understanding this history will enable us to point to an alternative to capitalist property relations.

The history of capitalism

Before capitalism existed, there were feudal kingdoms.  During these times, serfs lived on manors and farmed the land.  The serf lived their entire life on the manor and wasn’t allowed to leave. 

Artisans produced the items the royal families wanted.  This was small-scale production that didn’t attempt to fulfill the needs of society as a whole.

Out of this atmosphere a new capitalist class emerged.  Doctors, journalists, bankers, and small business owners gradually came into conflict with the royal families.  Eventually, revolutions erupted and the capitalist class came to power.

The new rulers forced the serfs off the land and they moved to the cities.  In these cities the former serfs became workers where they toiled under horrendous conditions.  Under these conditions, a new working class emerged that demanded improved working conditions.  This new class will learn that working people produce all of the wealth of the world. 

As capitalism developed, the small companies competed with one another and used machinery in a way to cut costs.  This machinery allowed the capitalists to eliminate jobs.  However, in order to pay for the machinery and produce a profit the capitalist needed to be obsessed with cutting costs.  This process meant that only a few large corporations would dominate the economy of entire nations.

Here we see one of the fundamental problems with capitalism.  As the capitalist hires fewer and fewer production workers their percent of profit on investment declines.  This means that corporations will always be obsessed with cutting costs.  Corporations will also need to grow in order to obtain a smaller and smaller percent of profit.

Because corporations have become so large they have relied more and more on banks for their funding.  Today banks and other investment companies dominate capitalist economies.  Whenever we hear a corporation claim that it isn’t making money, we need to ask the question: How much money is that corporation paying in interest to a bank?  Corporations view payments to banks as “expenses” but these so-called expenses are part of the surplus value derived from human labor.

Because of the need for corporations to continually grow, capitalists from all over the world compete with each other for domination of the world markets.  The first and second world wars decided that the United States would be the world’s superpower.

However, even with the economic domination of the world in the hands of just a few capitalist corporations, the decline in the rate of profit continues to be the cause of economic crisis. 

Investment capitalists used a scheme called “junk bonds” in an attempt to stabilize the market.  These junk bonds were regulated and when the bond traders violated these regulations, some went to prison. 

Then, investors invented a new scheme called “derivates.”  These derivatives have no government regulation and traders can sell them with little fear of going to prison.  The inventors of these derivatives funds received Nobel Prizes for their efforts.  Today there is about one thousand trillion dollars, or one quadrillion dollars invested in derivatives.  These funds are merely extremely complicated bets on how the market will perform in the future.  We might consider that while all this money is sitting in these useless funds, about forty percent of the world’s population lives on two dollars per day or less.           

What are small businesses?

Many supporters of capitalism argue that one way of “getting ahead” is to start a small business.  However, when we think of all the commodities we purchase, most of those commodities come from large corporations.  Our food comes from supermarkets.  Transportation usually comes from the auto companies.  Clothing comes from department stores.  Occasionally we might eat out, and the restaurant might, or might not, be a small business.

The government claims to regulate these corporations.  However, these so-called government regulations merely allow the large companies to continue to dominate the economy.  Corporations, as we have seen, are extremely skilled at deflecting any meaningful government regulations.

What is the alternative to capitalism?

Today, there is only one conclusion to this history.  While there were some progressive aspects to the emergence of capitalism, this system no longer represents anything progressive.  In fact, capitalism even in its earliest days, was a system of brutal repression.

The goal of the capitalist is to have economic stability.  In the long term, history has shown that this is virtually an impossible dream.  Since the earliest days of capitalism, the decline in the rate of profit has caused one crisis after another.  During the depression of the 1930’s the banks simply closed their doors and millions of working people lost all their savings.  Capitalists, on the other hand, managed to stay in business and received indispensable government support.  

I wrote about this history to say that there is an alternative to capitalism.  Working people produce all wealth in the world, yet we have no control over this wealth.  Capitalists use this wealth to continue to profit, while being obsessed with cutting costs.

A workers government would use the wealth we produce to guarantee that everyone would have the food, clothing, housing, education, and health care we all need to live.  Working people could work fewer hours with a much higher standard of living.

Instead of sitting in traffic jams after a long day’s work, we could ride on trains going 200 miles per hour while reading a news paper.  With the extra time on our hands we would be able to figure out the answers to the real problems we face.  These being the depletion of natural resources, the destruction of the environment, the cures for disease, and the best way to free humanity from ignorance and alienation.

When we listen to news annalists talk endlessly about the problem we face, we might consider that there is an elephant in the room that these annalists are determined not to see.  This elephant is the fact that the natural workings of the capitalist system, that they all support, is the root cause of our problems.  Working people have been organizing in unions to support our interests since the first years of capitalism.  When we see that we can control the wealth we produce, then, the world can begin to be constructed on completely new foundations.

 

                 

What is the significance of the Forth of July?

Every year the forth of July is a national holiday in the United States.  On this day we see people displaying flags of this country in every possible area.  We might consider that this day is a celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the year 1776.  This declaration is a list of grievances given by representatives of the thirteen colonies against the British crowned government.  These grievances explained why the thirteen colonies decided to carry out a political revolution against the British.  At the time, the British government was the most powerful in the world.  These are the reasons the colonists gave for carrying out this revolution:

The Declaration of Independence

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

History doesn’t always give us a clear explanation of how or why events unfolded.  On the one hand, the Declaration of Independence promoted “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  The British rule of the thirteen colonies was, indeed, tyrannical.  The class of people called “gentleman” were the only people who had full rights in the thirteen colonies.  Someone could only become a gentleman through birth.  These so-called gentlemen could sentence everyday people to horrendous punishments whenever they chose to.  Today, no one argues that this country would be better off if it were ruled by the British crown.

On the other hand, the Declaration of Independence used the racist word savage, when it referred to the first inhabitants of this part of the world.  The government that came into existence with the Declaration of Independence continued the genocidal war against Native Americans for over 100 years.

Other views on the Declaration of Independence

Many of those who supported the revolution owned slaves and supported the continuation of this savage institution.  One of those slaves was Frederick Bailey.  Bailey escaped from slavery at the age of 19 and changed his name to Frederick Douglass.  Douglass changed his name because escaping from slavery was against the law and this made him a criminal in the eyes of the government.  

Recently a statue was unveiled in Washington D.C. of Frederick Douglass.  Eventually he became a leader of the movement to abolish slavery.  On July 5, 1852, Douglass gave a speech where he was asked to talk about the meaning of the Forth of July holiday.  The quotation below is an excerpt from that speech:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?  I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.  To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons of thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.  There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reins without rival….”

In 1967 Martin Luther King echoed the words of Douglass when he spoke out in opposition to the war against Vietnam.  King argued that the United States government was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

Malcolm X also spoke to this issue.  He argued that Black people in the United States were part of an international struggle for freedom and human dignity.  He argued that the Vietnamese had a common struggle with Black people in the United States.  He proposed that the World Court place the United States government on trial for the human rights abuses against Black people.  He also said, that the rights of Black people need to be defended, “by any means necessary.”

Why does the government spy in citizens?

Recently, the newspapers have reported that the National Security Agency is spying on the phone records and personal internet information of citizens in this country.  They say they will only uncover these records of people who are under suspicion.  In the past, the government has spied on both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  The U.S. government, at one time viewed Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.

The immediate question to be asked is: Why is this happening?  While the answer to this question is clear, the pro-capitalist media doesn’t even consider giving a rational answer to this question.  There is a reason for this.

The capitalist system defies all rationalizations that attempt to defend it.  We are talking about a political economic system where a tiny minority of the population lives in opulence.  Working people routinely toil in horrendous conditions and have no control of their working environments.  Poverty is a fact of life in all capitalist nations and it is increasing.  Women, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and gays routinely experience discrimination.  War and the destruction of the environment are necessary for capitalism. 

All of these horrors are routine facts of life for one and only one reason.  This is to maximize profits on investments for capitalists.

This is why the government has always needed to spy on the people of this country.  The system of capitalism doesn’t make any sense at all.  Because the government chooses to defend this system they spy on anyone who opposes their rule.  This is why they spied on Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela.

Conclusion

The Forth of July signifies that the United States was born because of a political revolution.  The Civil War was another revolution that removed slave owners from the positions of power they held.  The labor, civil rights, woman’s, and anti-war movements all erupted to challenge the routine practices of corporations and their supporters in the U.S. government.

If we look at the Forth of July from this point of view, I believe we can gain the perspective we will need to make this a nation where there will be human dignity for all.  We can also gain insight by looking at the struggles that took place in the past.

Thomas Paine was one the supporters of the first American Revolution.  Pain wrote a pamphlet titled Common Sense that was the most popular piece of literature in the thirteen colonies.  This pamphlet influenced the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

During the revolution the forces supporting independence had suffered several defeats.  The revolutionary army took refuge in a cold winter in Valley Forge and they were short of supplies.  They needed to figure out how they would continue the fight to defeat the most powerful army in the world.

During that period, this is what Thomas Paine had to say:

“These are the times that try men’s souls.  The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country, but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” 

I will close with another quotation from Frederick Douglass:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.  Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”