FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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City councils from Seattle to New York to Los Angeles have adopted the $15 minimum wage to begin in 2020. The bosses’ media and the “$15 an hour” movement call this a victory against poverty. We say it is only an adjustment to our wage slavery while posing as an example that capitalism can meet our needs.
The wage system chains us to the capitalist bosses. It creates profits for them and poverty for us. The bosses use the wage system to pay us as little as possible to guarantee that we have to keep working or our families don’t eat, so we can make them big profits and raise the next generation of wage slaves.
Communist revolution aims to smash the wage system. It’s us wage slaves who produce everything in society. Our skills, our work, our co-operation and knowledge create everything we need. Communists say the main thing we need is each other and the last thing we need are capitalists, their profits and their wage system.
The vast majority of humankind is wage workers. Organized as communists around principles of “from each according to commitment and ability, to each according to need,” we can create a world that values people not profits. Our collective labor can and will build houses, roads, bridges, desalinization facilities, and everything else we need—directly—without any wages or money.
Money or wages also create the illusion that we workers can’t survive without the bosses or run the world without money. Even the old communist movement fell for the fallacy that money is indispensable, at least temporarily. That is why they fought for socialism – state capitalism – which kept money and wages, and not for communism.
Today the $15/hour movement follows the reformist tradition which from the beginning of capitalism, has fought for higher wages as the way to eliminate poverty. But with higher or lower wages we remain exploited and oppressed.
Thus, many US bosses see no danger in supporting the $15/hour campaign, claiming they also want to eliminate poverty. Their goal, however, is to calm the anger of millions of fast food and retail workers who slave today for a much lower minimum wage. They want to corral these workers into the dead end-street of electoral politics and pacifism.
US bosses, however, have other concerns. On May 6, Governor Cuomo of New York advocated raising the minimum wage to “fight income inequality.” He said: “Fast food workers and their families are twice as likely to receive public assistance compared with other working families…New York State spends $6,800 a year (on food stamps, welfare, etc) per fast food worker.”
This he claimed is a big subsidy to fast food industry which last year made enormous profits from $551 billion in global revenue! $15 an hour will not make a dent in this vast income inequality that is built into capitalism. But it is being used to build the lie that capitalism can be made “kinder” to meet workers’ needs, while using the money the government will save to pay for their current and future wars.
Many activists fighting to raise the minimum raise do want to eliminate poverty. Laws, City Councils, and Congress cannot and will not achieve this goal. They need to join the struggle to mobilize for a communist revolution to build a society based only on meeting human needs.
McDonalds won’t exist. We will produce only healthy food for workers everywhere. We urge you to join us, to start by reading Red Flag and distributing it to friends and co-workers, and invite them to join also.