EDITORIAL
The Future Can Belong to Our Class, the Working Class

Jun 24, 2019

The following article is the editorial from The SPARK’s workplace newsletters for the week of June 17, 2019.

Trump is a master of distraction and deception. Whatever it takes to grab a headline, he’ll do it: threats, misstatement of fact, outright lies. He lies as readily as some people blow air out of their behinds.

In the other corner are the Democrats—who talk about impeachment, and talk about it, and then talk about it some more. More smoke blown in the air, more distraction!

And none of it is real.

Here’s what’s real: The capitalist economy is in the tenth year of a so-called “recovery,” but working people haven’t recovered.

Two generations of people are living less well than their parents did, and they won’t ever catch up. Temporary jobs replace permanent jobs. Part-time jobs push out full-time jobs. Wal-mart wages pull down auto wages, and Amazon wages pull down Wal-mart’s. Older people who saw pensions evaporate are working at McDonald’s. Veterans of this country’s wars beg on street corners and live in make-shift tents under expressways.

The capitalist class calls this a “recovery.” Let’s call it what it is: a class war carried out by the capitalist class against all the people who work for their living.

For ten years, the capitalist class kept wages low, took the money stolen from our labor, used it to live in enormous luxury. They accumulated ever more wealth. They speculated, threatening the whole economy. They used their government and its military to steal wealth from other countries.

It’s a disaster, but it’s not natural. It comes from the way the economy is organized, from the way the capitalist class runs society.

We need a different kind of society, a society the working class could organize.

Working people can do this. There are more than two hundred million of us in this country who are part of the working class. We spend our days making things run in the factories, the offices, the stores, the warehouses, the restaurants, the little work shops. We are the ones on the building sites or running trucks over the road. We fix the electric lines and sewers. Our cousins are still on the farms, producing food. Some of us are retired. Some teach or care for children. Some are the children who, next year, will be the ones who work.

Taken all together, we are the majority, the very big majority. Our work is vitally necessary if the economy is to run. Let us be the ones who decide how it will run, who it will serve.

But capitalist society is not organized to let the majority decide. Yes, we can vote—in an election every four years. We can choose between candidates put up by two old parties that don’t represent us, choose between people funded by the millionaire class. We’ve been doing it for more than a hundred and fifty years. And it doesn’t work.

This is no democracy.

We do the work. We should decide how to organize it, what to produce, how to distribute what is produced so everyone shares in the wealth our labor creates.

The only way that working people will be able to make the decisions is when we bring our forces together to fight. And when we organize, we need all of us together: black, white, Latino, immigrants from countries all over the world.

Yes, maybe workers haven’t made a real fight lately. But working people will fight again. When we do, it won’t be enough just to fight. We must organize ourselves to take over and run the economy, the whole society, so it serves the population.

The capitalist class that runs the country today is an old worn-out used-up class, good for nothing other than to steal and to destroy.

Working people can fight, not only to bring up our standard of living. We can fight to get rid of a parasitic capitalist class. It’s the only way to defend ourselves.

We can organize society in our image, reflecting this multitudinous class we are. The future can belong to our class, the working class.