FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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The entire South African steel industry may be destroyed. Two hundred thousand jobs are at stake. (Mail and Guardian, 8/27)
Destroyed by what? A war? It would take a pretty big war to destroy a whole industry.
A natural disaster? It would take a pretty big earthquake to destroy a whole industry.
Instead, the SA steel industry is threatened by one of the most destructive forces on earth: capitalist overproduction.
Overproduction (or overcapacity) occurs when the bosses’ factories can produce more goods than they can sell. The less competitive factories—like South African steel mills— face bankruptcy. And steel production isn’t threatened only in South Africa. According to El País (9/30) 45,000 jobs in the Mexican steel industry are in danger.
Lots of steel would not be a problem if we produced for our needs. We could build lots of buses and planes, housing, farm equipment and so on.
Under communism, led by the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP), this will happen.
But not under capitalism. Under capitalism, overproduction is bad news for workers.
Under capitalism, the market “demands” only what people can pay for, not what they need. Too many bosses chase a shrinking market. This means factory closures, layoffs, unemployment, homelessness and hunger. Government revenue collapses and the bosses impose harsh austerity measures.
As one industry cuts back, it demands less material from its suppliers. They in turn cut back and layoff. The cutbacks in steel production mean a smaller market for iron ore and more miners laid off. It’s a death spiral.
Increased competition forces the bosses to speed up those still working. The pressure to wage war to destroy the competition intensifies. (See article page 3.) Sexism and racist terror intensify. Immigrants are singled out for especially harsh attacks.
The South African government, for example, recently arrested masses of immigrant workers. A few weeks later, the same government approved a mass strike for jobs. State-sponsored xenophobia and state-approved strikes: all to keep workers from putting capitalist society on trial.
World’s Workers React Swiftly
The bosses lie that the hardship is only temporary. Workers have heard this before. They don’t believe it. The fight-backs are swift and global.
Recently 80,000 people demonstrated against austerity in Manchester, UK. Days later 150,000 demonstrated in Brussels. French- and Dutch-speaking united. They faced off against water cannons using any weapons they could find.
In Paris, hundreds of workers stormed an Air France board of directors meeting that was called to lay off 2,900. The bosses escaped the meeting with their fancy clothes in tatters.
In the US, Chrysler-Fiat workers rejected a union-supported contract for the first time in decades.
And earlier this year Bolivian miners rebelled and took over the town of Potosí for nearly a month.
Communism: Abundance – Eventually; Overproduction Crisis – Never
Communism probably won’t be able to produce abundance immediately. Like the Bolsheviks (Russian communists) before us, we will have to fight a bitter war against bosses trying to crush us. By mobilizing the masses (as the Bolsheviks did) but this time for communism (which they didn’t) we will beat off the attacks.
At some point, we will be able to produce an abundance of goods like steel. Under communism, this will be good news. It gives us new choices.
We could keep producing steel and stockpile it for future use. The bosses hate doing this because for them it is capital lying idle. But communism will abolish money and all forms of finance. No more capital means no harm in stockpiles.
We could cut back on steel production, freeing up labor for other tasks like making buses or building homes. There will always be work for all, meaning no question of unemployment. No homelessness or hunger because we’ll take care of everyone’s needs regardless of their work situation.
We could lighten the workload of those still producing steel: fewer hours, a more relaxed pace, more time for safety, at less cost to the environment. All workers will have more time to build communist social relations worldwide.
Opportunity for ICWP to Grow
There are signs in almost every sector that overproduction is squeezing the world economy. One is the drop in commodity prices. Another is global trade stagnation, the result of bosses trying to undercut each other for a larger share of the shrinking market.
Another is lack of growth and high unemployment, even in “advanced” countries like France. U. S. manufacturing is contracting. Every BRICS economy (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) is slowing down or plunging into depression.
Will this crisis “put bourgeois society on trial” as The Communist Manifesto predicted? Yes, but to win a conviction ICWP needs more recruits.
No crisis on its own will finish capitalism. Only the masses mobilized for communist revolution can do this.
In recent weeks, friends in 18 countries have circulated our literature. We need you, too, to join us, circulate Red Flag and the global refugee leaflet, recruit your friends, family, and co-workers.
Mass rebellion and widespread circulation of our literature open up opportunities. To realize this new potential we must spend more time off the job with our fellow workers. Together, we’ll end capitalism and its crises. We’ll build the communist world we need and want.
It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
The Communist Manifesto, 1848
CAPITALIST CRISES CREATE CAPITALIST WARS
Politics and economics are always fused. In the era of empire, capitalist crises of overproduction create capitalist wars. In fact, you can measure the depth of the crisis by the scale of the wars it produces. It’s not a straight line, but generally, crises since the 1970s have been followed by weaker recoveries and greater tensions in the world. And so the crisis of the 1970s produced a recovery with more expansive regional wars in the 1980s.
The Iran – Iraq war saw the biggest tank battle since World War II. The Malvinas –Falkland’s war saw the biggest naval invasion since World War II.
The slump of the 1980s produced even more massive wars of the 1990s. First the US Persian Gulf War, and then the war in Africa, where five million people in the Congo were slaughtered over which power could gain the property rights to the minerals and raw materials of the land.
Now, as the crisis of 2008 looks like the beginning of the world’s third major Depression, we see regional wars turn into sub-continental wars. From Turkey to Yemen a whole subcontinent is consumed by war.
It’s not that capitalism has no answers. It’s that each answer proves more deadly than the previous one.
It’s not that the masses have no solution. It’s that we, the readers of Red Flag and members and friends of ICWP, must seize the hour. In March, 1917, the Bolsheviks, the revolutionary Russian party, had only a few thousand members. By the summer of that year they had a quarter of a million, and by November they had taken power.
Let them start their wars. We will finish them! It’s more urgent than ever in this situation to mobilize the masses for communism.
