Digging below the surface of this crisis

Have you lost your job?

Are you in danger of getting kicked out of your house or rental unit because of the mortgage crisis?

Do you work full time but keep falling behind on your bills?

Do you find it impossible to balance health care needs with the cost of everything else—from food, transportation and education to just trying to get a little enjoyment out of life?

Don’t beat yourself up. It’s not because you did something wrong.

You have plenty of company. Many tens of millions in this country are really suffering. Your problems are not personal. Even if you did everything “right”—struggled to get an education and job skills, struggled to find full-time work, struggled to be pleasant and agreeable on your job even when you were justifiably angry over conditions—you could still be in the same boat.

Just keep this in mind. You’re living in a particular kind of economic system. It’s called capitalism. It creates enormous instability and inequality—the rich get richer, the workers get poorer.

It’s now at the point where the rich are so disgustingly rich, and the workers so poor, that a downward spiral has started. The capitalists are always competing with each other to raise their profits. They close plants or move them to where wages are even lower. That leaves even poorer workers, and less people able to buy what’s produced. Which causes more companies to fold. And so on in a vicious circle.

Maybe you remember the days when it all seemed to be working. More goods produced, more jobs created. But the bosses were getting a thousand dollars for every one of ours. And they spent a lot of it on new technology, to get an edge over their competitors. They were producing more but laying off workers at the same time and driving down wages. People were buying on credit, hoping to earn enough in the future to stay on top of their debts.

Now it’s all coming due—credit cards, student loans, home mortgages—at the same time that workers are losing their jobs. And for those lucky enough to be working, wages are lower today, in real dollars, than 30 years ago. Plus it’s much harder to find a full-time job. And benefits? Most new workers never see them.

But don’t despair. Things are going to get even tougher, but capitalism won’t be eternal. It will be replaced by something much, much better.

Think how different your life would be if, from the time you were a kid, you knew you could get an education free—up to any level you desired.

If you knew that at any point in your adult life, you could get a job that paid a decent wage—enough for you to live independently and raise a family, if you wished.

If you knew that you’d never have to worry about how to pay for medical care if you or a family member got sick.

If you knew that when you reached retirement age, you would automatically get a decent pension to live out your life in dignity and comfort.

The right to a job or income for life. The right to free health care. The right to free education. The right to decent, affordable housing.

Impossible? Think again. All this is just common sense—once we get rid of the profit motive.

With all the wealth created by workers in this country, we could have all this and a lot more. In fact, we could cut the workweek, too, and take longer vacations, so people would have time to live instead of work until they drop.

Instead, capitalism directs most of the wealth workers create into the hands of those already enormously wealthy, who often have more than they know what to do with.

The capitalist drive for profits is also what’s behind the endless wars and trillions of dollars spent on stationing troops all over the globe.

What workers everywhere need is SOCIALISM.

Why? Because it’s the only system that takes the wealth of society—the wealth created by workers—out of private hands. We’re not talking about taking away workers’ personal property. It’s not socialists but capitalists who are taking away workers’ homes, cars and furniture and garnisheeing their wages. We’re talking about taking the billions stolen from workers’ labor away from the whole capitalist class and using it for people’s needs.

No more Enrons or Halliburtons running the economy, no more billionaires controlling the government!

When the working class, the vast majority of the people, dissolve the corporations and banks that run everything now and set up a new government under their control to make the decisions about how society’s wealth should be used, we will have true democracy. There’s no democracy when private wealth buys political power. Elections under capitalism are only a cover for plutocracy—the rule of the wealthy.

Socialist governments set up by organized, militant workers can—and have—put into place the kinds of universal guarantees mentioned above: jobs, health care, education and housing for all. The human needs that capitalism can’t solve become the first priorities of a socialist revolution.

Is getting socialism easy? Hell, no! The bosses wage a constant war against the workers. These super-rich parasites make it extremely hard for workers just to organize unions, let alone challenge the political power of the ruling class.

But fighting for socialism is a whole lot better than the alternative: letting the capitalists run the working class and our whole planet into the ground with depressions, wars and unbridled environmental destruction. Fighting for socialism is fighting for the future of the human race.

Right now, there’s a lot we can and must do to fight the bosses and the capitalist state on every level.

We need to resist the foreclosures and the seizure of workers’ personal property. We need to demand the right to our jobs and stop the layoffs. We need to combat racism, sexism, homophobia and persecution of immigrants. All this is absolutely necessary to build the working-class unity needed to push back the bosses.

We need to organize more unions, more youth and community groups and make them fight in our interests. We need to resist imperialist wars and bring the troops home.

But as long as we’re split into separate groups fighting alone for this and for that, we can’t make big gains. The struggle for socialism brings all these issues together.

When you’re a socialist, you’re for the rights of all the workers and oppressed, not just yourself. You’re for solidarity with the working people of all nations. You’re for equality, sharing and conservation of the earth’s resources, instead of a constant bloody struggle over control of these resources by competing capitalist groups. You’re for helping raise the standard of living everywhere, not lowering wages here to those of the poorest countries.

The stronger the socialist movement, the stronger will be all these people’s struggles.

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