EDITORIAL
The Working Class Does the Work—The Working Class Should Control the Economy

Feb 8, 2026

Over 70,000 manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have been cut since last spring.

When Trump came to office, he claimed he was going to increase manufacturing jobs by bringing them back from other countries. In April, he imposed big tariff increases on foreign products. Since then, the U.S. government has collected on average about 30 billion dollars per month.

But those protectionist measures didn’t stop the terrible job losses in this country.

That’s because the job losses are not caused by foreign competition. “Free trade,” “China,” and “Mexico” have been blamed for the huge loss in manufacturing jobs for many, many decades. But it was always a cover story that U.S. companies used to impose ever harsher sacrifices on the workforce, especially by increasing the pace of work so that fewer workers do ever more work. Over the last year, for example, the very same companies cutting jobs were actually INCREASING production in this country by over three percent.

The job cuts in manufacturing are a part of a new wave of layoffs hitting U.S. workers right in the face. At the end of January, Amazon announced that it would lay off an additional 16,000 corporate employees after laying off 14,000 workers in the fall. UPS said it plans to slash 30,000 jobs this year, on top of 48,000 job cuts last year.

Other major companies, such as Tyson Foods, HP, Intel, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, and Microsoft, also announced mass layoffs.

Some companies blame the introduction of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robots for eliminating jobs. Other companies claim they are eliminating jobs because they supposedly hired too many people after the pandemic. In other words, employers try to pretend that it isn’t their fault, they have no choice but to destroy the livelihoods of countless thousands of people at one stroke.

No choice? Year after year, U.S. companies have been making record profits, not just in dollar terms, but as a share of the economy. They enrich their biggest shareholders, making millionaires into billionaires. And they routinely reward top executives with tens of millions of dollars a year in compensation, if not more.

And no one blinks an eye. Because the capitalist economy is about corporations accumulating ever higher profits, making the rich even richer. It’s their economy, their society, and they make the rules.

But it is the working population which actually does the work. We produce everything and make everything run. While the capitalist billionaires have so much money, they don’t know what to do with it all. They buy ever bigger and more costly yachts, private jets and mansions. They speculate and gamble with it, pushing up speculative markets, from stocks and bonds to real estate, crypto and gold.

But it is the working class which makes the economy run. The entire society could easily function a lot better if it wasn’t run for ever higher profits and ever greater enrichment of a tiny minority.

So, the working class will have to find a way to grab the control of the economy from the capitalist billionaires by expropriating their wealth and overthrowing this government that completely serves the interests of the capitalist billionaires.

Together, working people can decide what to produce, how to produce it and in what quantity. Workers could easily eliminate the scourge of unemployment by distributing the work among all. Workers can put an end to the destructive competition between workers in different countries by cooperating with workers in other countries so that progress made by workers in one country benefits workers in the other countries.

This is not an impossible dream. The material and technological means are already there, within our reach.