The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

State of the (Bosses’) Union

Feb 7, 2011

“We are poised for progress,” declared Obama in the 2011 “State of the Union” address. “Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.... We have broken the back of this recession.”

But, there’s only one problem–unemployment. Obama blames the lack of jobs on technology, which, he says, has made many production and clerical jobs obsolete, and he blames global production, which throws American workers into competition with other workers for jobs.

So Obama proposed more tax breaks and subsidies for corporations to get them to engage in “innovative” research–and create jobs.

He proposed to cut all corporate income tax rates, to give them more capital so they can “compete”–and create jobs.

Big business doesn’t need money. It’s not for lack of capital it doesn’t create jobs. The 50 biggest U.S. industrial corporations today have one trillion dollars in reserve, NOT being invested.

It is more profitable for them to squeeze more work out of fewer workers. That’s what they have been doing for years. The Gross Domestic Product is growing again. Manufacturing production increased again. But the number of people working declined.

Jobs are not obsolete–they are being crunched together, one person doing the work of two, or even three.

It’s not technology or globalization that stole the jobs–it’s capitalists, the class that Democrats and Republicans both front for.