Workers from 200 cities are currently walking out on jobs, in
places such as Atlanta, New York, Boston and Los Angeles, joined by workers in
Brazil, New Zealand and the UK, and including workers in fast-food chains such
as McDonalds. This has become the largest recent protest against corporate
greed. The current minimum wage in the US remains at $7.25, less than half of
what the workers are demanding.
With over three decades of neoliberal privatizations, the
working-class in the US and South America are impelled by financial
difficulties and poverty to take matters into their own hands, and no longer
rely on false bourgeois party promises for reform. The gap between the rich and
the poor in the US has reached gargantuan levels as the working-class is forced,
through privatization of social services, to pay for their own social
reproduction through their stagnant wages. Capital wants to remove all of its
responsibility and costs of the social reproduction of labour and to force the
working class to pay for this cost through their wages: such as the cost of
housing, health care, and education. What was once a high taxation (over 70%), is
now a tax haven for corporations (26% in the UK). The Keynesian demand
management of the economy, which temporarily dampened the economic crisis cycles,
came to a crashing end with Thatcher and Regan, and replaced with ubiquitous
privatization and globalization: both of which breaks the back of organized
labour and drives wages and benefits to the ground.
In the absence of nationalized institutions, state planning and
some social appropriation of common wealth of the liberal era, the
contradictions of capital are now in full display in the US. The exchange value
system of capitalism can no longer even provide the basic use-values necessary
for the working class to survive, let alone generate the demand for the realization
of profit in the market. The credit card solution to close the gap between real
wages, disposable income and the demand in the economy only proved to deepen
the unfolding crisis of capitalism: a major cause of the credit crisis in
housing. The only remedial solution for the working-class in the US, in the
face of a congress that is vacuous of any working-class organizational form, is
to militate in the streets, through strikes and walk-outs: which is happening
today in the streets of US. However, the struggle of the working-class in the
US for the exaction of higher wages becomes a defeated cause if it is not
supported by route towards a systemic change. The bourgeois may be forced to
spend more on variable-cost (labour) but it will get back what it has lost through
the higher cost of living. For example a worker may get an increase of $5
dollars/hour in wages, but s/he will pay it back through higher cell-phone costs,
water bills, electricity bills, or through general inflation. Capitalism wins
in the end. Discursive struggles for wages and benefits through walkouts and
strikes must turn into worker take-over of sectors where value is produced (industrial
sector) and where the profit is realized in the market (the service sector). A
conscious working-class, immune to the hegemonic ideology of neoliberalism,
which realizes that it is the primary producer of social wealth, and that it is
entitled to what it produces, only then is a threat to the fat cats of the
capitalist class. Otherwise capitalism will make small adjustments to the cost
of production and reclaim its losses in other ways. In this way, only fighting
for wages, and not targeting capitalism’s mode of production and appropriation
of common wealth, is not a working-class solution at all.
Today’s working-class struggle is an urban struggle. Traditional
and literal Marxist readers have for years banked on the industrial proletariat
(the value producers in society) to be the revolutionary group to overthrow capitalism.
However today, with three decades of neoliberal export of industrial jobs from
the West to Asia, where labour is cheap and none unionized, the urban service
workers in the West have gained a revolutionary character. Surplus-value
production and profit necessitates both production and realization: for example
without Primark and Walmart workers, capital would not be able to realize value
that was produced by the sweatshop workers of Cambodia and Thailand. Further,
urban service workers in the West are at the crux of the class struggle and
they have an enormous power to put a halt to capital circulation. For example
it will only take a general bus strike to shut down an entire city such as
London or Paris. If the city workers such as garbage collectors stopped working
for only a few days, the entire city will stop functioning. Truck drivers and
taxi drivers can block highways and major roads that would paralyze a city. However,
all these actions and demonstrations of power can only be revolutionary praxis
if it is supported ideologically via a revolutionary party that aims for
structural change and not settle for short term gains. Otherwise, it will be
business as usual for capitalism: using state power to make each strike illegal
and to use its media and its monopoly on violence to crush the working-class.
Chia Barsen
www.chiabarsen.com
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