Our task: explain the causes of capitalist crisis
Excerpts from a
talk by Gloria La Riva
We live in the richest society that has ever existed. The
wealth of the United States far surpasses that of any earlier
empire. And inside this richest society in history, 25
percent of all children--50 percent of all African American
children--live in poverty. Millions go to sleep without their
most basic needs met.
Here we are in the pinnacle of capitalism, and millions
are hungry and homeless. Almost 50 million have no health
care at all and an equal number have health coverage that's
so bad that for all practical purposes they have none.
And this is in the big boom, the most prolonged capitalist
boom ever, as the financial experts never tire of boasting.
Unemployment, they say, is 4 percent. Forget about the 2
million people in prison who aren't counted, not to mention
others who aren't counted at all.
Twenty-five percent of all the world's prisoners are in
the United States, which has just 4 percent of the world's
population. Leaving aside the brutal military interventions
all over the world, from looking at the domestic scene in the
best of times we can say with certainty that capitalism is a
doomed system.
The "best of times" has left 40 percent of the 11 million
people in Los Angeles County living in poverty. The boom is
looking more than a little frayed.
A TV station in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley,
is running an ad for a news series. It shows a young man
riding a city bus. The voice-over says, "A month ago you were
a 28-year-old millionaire. Today you're just a 28-year-old.
Inside the dot-com bust."
In San Francisco, the landlords and developers are jacking
up the rents sky-high. The lowest rent for a newly vacated
apartment is $2,000 a month and rising. That's in the poor
areas. A new study of the Bay Area shows that a person needs
a $28-an-hour job to live comfortably there. The minimum wage
in California is one-fifth of that.
What will a downturn, even a relatively mild one, mean
under these circumstances? How will workers understand and
interpret what is happening?
This is where the Party comes in. As Lenin explained, we
don't control the tempo of economic development or of
spontaneous mass movements. But we do have a critical role.
And that is to explain the root causes of unemployment, war,
racism, sexism, lesbian, gay, bi and trans oppression, and
environmental destruction.
We have to explain how to organize a mass movement, a
revolutionary movement, that not only fights back and
resists, but fights to overturn this system.
There is a growing movement that is rightly denouncing
these crimes of capitalism and even naming the illness:
capitalist greed. But what they propose as a solution is a
milder form of capitalism.
It's not so much because they like capitalism, but because
they don't believe capitalism can ever be eliminated. If you
talk to many of these activists, they aren't against
socialism. But to them it seems like a dream, an
impossibility.
The truth, which we proclaim here today as we have
throughout our Party's existence, is this: Socialism is the
only alternative for humanity.
With all the laws against monopolies that were passed in
the United States at the turn of the last century, during the
rise of imperialism and industrial capital, was the furious
pace of monopolization of oil, auto, steel, the military, the
banks, slowed down at all?
There are all kinds of laws against monopoly practices,
but there are now 457 billionaires.
We are so involved in the movement that we sometimes
forget that the average person knows nothing about socialism
because they've never been exposed to it except in the most
minimal way in school. The average person doesn't know that
any socialist parties exist in the United States.
Most people don't even know the profound history of
struggles of workers and oppressed peoples in the United
States, or the potential and necessity of struggle today.
The question is not whether workers are open to Marxism.
Our biggest concern should be that they haven't been exposed
to Marxist ideas. And yet they instinctively understand their
relationship to the bosses, to the government. They view the
authorities they live under with mistrust and cynicism.
Once most workers learn or get involved in the struggle,
it opens their eyes to the truth.
Today the possibilities are endless. We have a duty to
organize and reach out and meet people across the country.
It's the only way that Marxism and our Party will get a
hearing and grow.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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