Capitalism arose gradually hundreds of years ago, mainly through competition among various trades and businesses. They grew into giants that continue to devour their smaller rivals. As corporations try to beat each other to market to sell their products, some inevitably outdo others, leaving the losers with products they can’t sell. But to maintain profits as much as possible, the smaller rivals cut their costs by laying off workers. Even those able to sell their products continually replace some workers with machinery and then speed up the rest.

Capitalists call this process “productivity” and claim that, despite the inevitable layoffs, it is good for both workers and capitalists. After all, they say, this represents progress.

So the underlying cause of unemployment is instability in profits caused by competition among capitalists, combined with their control over employment. Competition is built into the system. Capitalists cannot do away with it, even if they wanted to.

Competition is so commonplace that we rarely notice its harmfulness. We’re taught competition is “natural in human society.” We’re even trained to enjoy competition through such things as sports and contests. We’re taught to focus on winners, rarely being reminded that for every winner there are losers, unless we’re among those losers. This process of competition produces losers, psychologically and often monetarily.

Competition inevitably harms some, and often most, whether participants or fans. It fosters individualistic concentration on one’s own welfare, whether real or imagined, and works to destroy class solidarity. Therefore, competition is not good for workers and certainly isn’t “natural.”

A fundamental aspect of capitalism is its use of racism: both to set up competition between white workers and black, Latino, Asian and others, dividing our class and reaping super-profits for the bosses, as well as dragging down conditions for all workers.

Capitalists must maximize profits and expand their business in order to survive. But as winners eat up losers and grow, eventually monopoly results, and competition in that line of business ends — until foreign capitalists move in. For example, Japanese auto manufacturers began to crowd out GM, Ford and Chrysler in the 1970s. Capitalist competition inherently has a tendency to abolish itself, although prolonged through international rivalry.

Each nation’s capitalist class is forced to grab resources, cheap labor and markets. Often this grab requires war; the capitalists become imperialists. Inter-imperialist rivalry is now the cause of every war on the planet, whether local or a world war.

While imperialists invent excuses to fight, in order to gain the loyalty of “their” workers — such as “weapons of mass destruction”; “humanitarian reasons”; “we were attacked”; and scores of other pretexts — the real reason is always international economic competition, To induce “their” workers to fight for them, imperialist governments are forced to lie — the bigger the lie, the more likely workers may believe it — impelling the illusion that, “if it were untrue, no government could get away with it.”

Inter-imperialist rivalry is why the U.S. ruling class, through its government, is sending working-class men and women (usually not their own sons and daughters) to kill other workers, and to risk death themselves, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s why U.S. rulers fought in Korea, Vietnam and in the first Gulf War. That’s why World Wars I and II developed, first among European and Asian bosses and later involving the U.S., and killed tens of millions of workers and others. Competition, with its inevitable outgrowths, is truly a death sentence for millions.

Additionally capitalist competition causes the waste of natural resources and continual pollution of air and water. Pollution heats the atmosphere with oil, coal, and natural gas-derived global warming and the melting of glaciers that provide water to drink, wash in, and to grow food.

The resulting rise in sea level will eventually force billions to move inland and create dislocations that will have unimaginable consequences for the working class (see the article “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System – Only Communism Can Create a Better Sustainable World,” in the Winter 2010 issue of “The Communist” magazine, also available on the PLP website).

Communism the Answer

The opposite of competition is cooperation. Only cooperation can produce winners with no losers. Only the complete absence of competition can produce general well-being. Why should we settle for a system that always produces losers? Particularly when losing under capitalism often spells death. Capitalism is like a gigantic gladiator sport, in which only some who enter the ring will leave it alive, and even the survivors suffer varying degrees of misery.

Communism will produce cooperation without losers. Sporting events can be for exercise and fun without keeping score. Economic winners under capitalism are always capitalists, while the losers are workers. We must destroy this death-dealing system and replaced it with communism.

Communism is run by the world’s working class under the leadership of its communist party for the benefit of our entire class worldwide. Work will then allow us to contribute to the welfare of our class, not just ourselves and our families. We will be able to distribute our needs without money. We will produce only what we need, instead of billions of unnecessary products whose only purpose is capitalist profits. We will eliminate waste of resources and pollution that sickens and kills millions.

Then we will eliminate wars — wars caused by competition between capitalists, that kill millions of workers while capitalists sit home counting their profits. For our long-term future, capitalism-caused climate change will then be brought under control, though it has already started on a course that will be increasingly difficult to reverse. Global warming already causes, and threatens to accelerate, violent weather events that kill hundreds of thousands, though such deaths will become preventable even in the face of such events.

Join and build the PLP to hasten the day that this noble goal is reached around the world. We and our children and grandchildren deserve no less.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, July 18 — Health workers, teachers, and students from the U.S. joined with our counterparts in a show of international solidarity in the class struggle. The first week of the Summer Project included organizing a health clinic and a freedom school. By relying on friends and comrades we were able to see 150 patients from two tent camps.

More than one million are forced to live in tents because the January 2010 earthquake either destroyed their homes or made them structurally unsound. The people in camps have been waiting on the government for help while trying to survive in these “temporary” facilities for the last year and a half.

The goals of the health clinic included trying to provide clinical health services and building awareness of public health issues like cholera, asthma, high blood pressure, and diabetes. We provided information and had discussions on how many of these diseases are related to social class, and ones’ ability to access clean water, enough food, and medical care. Many complained of gastrointestinal ailments that may have been due to a lack of food; also vaginal infections which may have been attributed to frequent douching, which changes the pH of the vagina.

In the clinic’s waiting area, people said that they were disgusted with the government’s inaction, and the UN troops which occupy Haiti. We were told that the troops spend most of the time on the beaches, and raping women. We used this opportunity to have political discussions on the struggle against our common enemy, the capitalist ruling class.

Haiti is a vivid example of capitalism’s use of racism to exploit workers. It has kept black workers there in virtual slavery for centuries and now has failed to alleviate the suffering from the earthquake that tore the country apart. This has produced super-profits for imperialist bosses.

One of the highlights of the week was when we joined workers on their picket line. About 800 workers had been laid off from the mayor’s office, but were never paid what they were owed. They sued and won in court, but under capitalism, the courts are just another branch of the government, working for the interests of the ruling class.

The workers have still not been paid after four years of struggle. We chanted in French/Kreyòl, “Workers Should Be Paid,” and “Justice for Workers.” We heard drivers’ horns blow in support of the picketers from the busy street. International solidarity was the order of the day.

The freedom school was attended by many students eager to exchange ideas that spanned broad social issues. The classrooms were overflowing with students enthusiastically discussing what is taught in the schools and what ideas are important to the working class, as well as the unity of teachers and students, and an analysis of capitalism and imperialism. Ninety percent of the schools in Haiti are private, so many have no opportunity for an education. People hunger for more education.

The friends we have made in Haiti signifies many new opportunities for building PLP. The future is bright!

CHICAGO, July 18 — “Brizard, you can’t hide, education cuts cause genocide!” rang through the streets of downtown Chicago on July 6. (Brizard is Chicago’s new schools CEO.) Students and teachers marched against Chicago Public Schools (CPS) bosses and the banks that steal millions from the education system.

The march was the closing event of an all-day National Conference to Fight Back for Public Education, organized by various “progressive” caucuses and union leaders.

PLP Exposes Fascist Assault on Public Schools

PL’ers participated on different levels. They advanced the Party’s politics, charging that the assault on public education is part of the bosses’ plan to step up fascist attacks and prepare our class for larger imperialist wars.

Many conference participants called for an “end to corporate greed” and to have the bosses pay “their fair share.” But workers have no “fair share” when it comes to their exploitation by the bosses who grab as much of the value produced by the working class as they can.

The Party exposed the fact that the cuts in education and health care were racist — falling most heavily on black and Latino workers and students — a product of capitalism, not just “bad capitalists.” Students from Farragut H.S., who are close to the Party, really brought this point to the fore as they led the chant, “How do you spell RACIST?!... CPS!”

Marchers Free Student
From KKKop Attack

These students, guided by the leadership of PLP, were finally given the vehicle to express their anger and frustration at the system. They were so good at it that a kkkop pulled one of them from the march for chanting “FIGHT BACK!”in his ear.

Immediately the marchers chanted “Let him go!” and he was quickly released. Even after the harassment, the student was not intimidated and led the marchers to chant, “They say cut back, WE SAY FIGHT BACK!”

This march was the final event of a week-long Summer Project here, followed by a PLP-hosted “reflection dinner.” Two students and one youth worker from Farragut spoke at the dinner about their experiences. The students thanked the Party for the “love and support” during the march, one saying he was happy not to be in jail.

The youth worker told a PL’er who he works with that he “felt at home.” He went to the New York Summer Project the following week and, after months of struggle, has now joined the Party. Five students now want to be in a PL study group.

We didn’t get the banks to stop robbing the working class, but we recruited a new comrade and brought more people closer to the Party. Building PLP and the movement for communist revolution is how we measure success within our activity in mass organizations.

The bosses can always take away reforms, but the might of the working class led by PLP fighting for a communist society is the only way to gain the life our class deserves. The more we recruit to our revolutionary army, the more we can defend our class from the bosses’ attacks now and prepare ourselves to take the offensive in the future.

The recent drama over the federal debt limit, with politicians in gridlock amid scare stories that the U.S. government might default on its bills, marks a significant move toward fascism by an embattled capitalist ruling class.

A default was averted when Democrats and Republicans agreed to at least $2.1 trillion spending cut over the next decade to counter a hike in the debt “ceiling,” the legal cap set by Congress on government borrowing. But the rulers’ internal crisis remains. The debt ceiling battle reveals their two essential needs in the current period:

To wring extreme profits from the working class with cuts in critical social services in a period of perpetual and massive racist unemployment.

To discipline their own ranks to help fund imperialist wars abroad and repair a crumbling infrastructure at home.

These imperatives are the hallmarks of fascism, the phase of capitalism that forces the ruling class to discard its mask of liberal democracy. President Obama recently took the lead on both fronts with his “Grand Bargain.” This ploy for “shared sacrifice” called for a devastating $3 trillion in spending cuts over the next ten years, alongside just $1 trillion in tax increases for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

The Republicans’ “no-new-taxes” (on the rich) pledge, pushed hardest by the elements coalescing around the Tea Party, gives Obama cover to maintain his liberal credentials even as he ruthlessly targets the most vulnerable workers: the old, the sick, the poor. And as the first black president, he is the bosses’ perfect tool to impose racist cutbacks that fall most heavily on black and Latino workers, the same people who were hardest hit by the latest economic crisis (see box on page 5).

Capitalists Divided

Liberal analysts misrepresented Washington’s debt standoff as a battle between crazed GOP ideologues and sane if ineffectual Democrats, like Obama, who are striving to protect a fragile economy.

In fact, both sides are acting rationally, against the working class, in selfish pursuit of profits. They represent two camps of capitalists with conflicting interests. As Lenin noted in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, there is a yawning gulf between entrepreneurs, who profit by managing capital in productive businesses, and financiers, who profit purely from “money capital” and seek to extend their domination over finance capitalists in other countries. The biggest financiers’ massive overseas investments require “the intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world.” By that, Lenin meant world war.

In the U.S. today, both capitalist factions demand the racist looting of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Their clash stems from how they get their respective wealth. The entrepreneurs (such as Koch Industries; see box) have a short-term, domestic focus that favors younger, rising firms. The financiers, represented by Obama and the banker-backed liberal wing led by the Rockefeller interests, have a longer-term, imperialist outlook to defend their worldwide empire, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Somalia and beyond. The financial capitalists still dominate U.S. policy — although, as the debt flap reveals, not absolutely.

On July 28, the nation’s biggest imperialist bankers sent a letter to Obama to plead for a resolution to the recent Congressional impasse. The consequences of a default, they wrote, would be “very grave” for “America’s global economic leadership” — a code phrase for imperialism. The signers included the chiefs of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of New York Mellon, and Boston’s State Street, which hold a combined $71 trillion in global assets under custody. By contrast, Forbes magazine estimates the Kochs’ wealth at $44 billion.

Going Where the Money Is

Obama’s cut and tax strategy has been shelved for now. But the president and his cheerleaders at the New York Times, both representing the main wing of the ruling class, will soon be back to demand that bosses big and small pony up — and $1 trillion will be just a down payment.

For the bosses, it’s less a matter of “fairness” than of narrowing options. They are willing and eager to drain the working class, but they’re running into objective limits. The global financial meltdown obliterated millions of jobs in the U.S., along with the tax revenues they generate. (In June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “real” unemployment rate — including unemployed, under-employed, and people “marginally attached to the workforce” — stood at 16.2 %, or more than 25 million people suffering for lack of work in the third year of Obama’s dead-on-arrival “recovery.” And for black and Latino workers, those jobless rates are double.)

Workers are being sucked dry. Thinning the social safety net will not be enough to keep the war machine humming. Both Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who signed off on the Grand Bargain before buckling to anti-tax Tea Party pressure, know that they’ll eventually have to go to where the money is: to the rich.

In 2008, the median income of the U.S. capitalist elite — the top 0.1% — was $6 million, versus $50,000 for American households as a whole. In 2007, the top 1% of the population controlled 43% of the nation’s financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), or  1½ times the bottom 95 percent. The federal government has locked in these gross inequalities by slashing capital gains and estate taxes and by failing to enforce anti-trust laws (Vanity Fair, May 2011).

But even as the biggest U.S. capitalists rake in more and more, they are contributing less and less to the government that is dedicated to protect their interests. Corporate income taxes now account for only 7% of federal revenues, as compared to 23% in 1960. The jobless rate tells us that corporations aren’t using this extra cash to hire more workers. Instead, they’re hoarding. The bloodsucking banks aside, non-financial companies are sitting on close to $2 trillion in liquid assets.

The outrageous greed of the super-wealthy fits neatly with the small-government creed of the Tea Party caucus. It works less well, however, with the overriding needs of U.S. imperialism. The debt ceiling fracas was the public face of the rulers’ fight over how to divide their wealth and rule their weakening empire. The bitter struggle over the fallback measure, with no boost in needed revenues, is a mere prelude to the struggle to come. The battle should escalate in the fall, when Obama pitches his “balanced approach” (more taxes) to the new Congressional “supercommittee” charged with fleshing out the deficit reduction deal.

Bosses’ Rx: War and Fascism

In the end, the rulers’ Rockefeller-led main wing must prevail for U.S. imperialism to fend off its competition. The regional wars of today foreshadow the world war to come, as new imperialist rivals (China, India, Brazil) and old ones (France, Germany, Russia) challenge U.S. dominance. Both now and later, huge infusions of cash will be required to expand the military. Meanwhile, Obama’s backers will continue to exploit debt concerns as they build a fascist mass movement — including a military draft and even more extreme worker “sacrifice” — all for the greater good of U.S imperialism.

Fascism represents the ultimate exploitation of workers. The income losses of millions of unemployed and the slashes in wages of tens of millions of those still employed are intensifying the exploitation of workers worldwide. It should be remembered that Germany’s Nazis supplemented their extermination camps with thousands of forced labor camps. Millions of Jews, communists, and others were commonly worked to death at mines, quarries, farms, factories, and construction sites. The free labor both shored up the German bosses’ profits and sustained their war effort.

Under capitalism, economic crises aren’t caused by debts or deficits. They reflect the contradictions of a profit-driven system that can never meet workers’ needs. That’s why we must fight for a world run by workers for the working class, not for the bankrolls of a few parasites on the top. Fight for a communist society for the working class led by PLP! Join us!J

Kochs Challenge Rockefellers; Workers Must Throw Them All Out

The Koch brothers, who finance the Tea Party and bash Obama, buy oil and manufactured products in many countries. They are heavily invested in industrialist accumulation in the U.S. but do not own a major bank nor do they profit from the huge U.S. war machine. However, they are also trying to establish a niche in their own special form of “imperialism on the cheap.”

The Kochs bankroll the Cato Foundation think-tank. Its Mid-East expert Leon Hadar thinks that the “ballooning deficit and an overstretched military leave Americans no choice but to make major cuts in defense spending by shrinking [the] U.S. role in the Middle East.” (Huffington Post, 7/5/11)

Hadar, no doubt smelling a potential supplier to Koch Oil, sees a deal with Teheran in the offing: “The United States should take part in any negotiations leading to regional agreements on Afghanistan and Iraq, a process that could also become an opportunity to improve the relationship with Iran.” (Cato Institute, 7/1/11) This, of course, runs counter to the interests of the Rockefeller-led, imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class which controls the largest chunk of Mid-East oil supplies.

Obama Fronts for Dominant Rockefeller Wing; Kochs Want Piece of the Action

The Koch brothers dream of catching up to the Rockefellers but the closest they’ve come to wielding state power is Tea Party obstructionism in Congress. They have a long way to go to match the Rockefellers’ long history of transforming their Standard Oil monopoly into a banking empire. Having trumped the J.P. Morgan clan by the 1930s, World War II left the Rockfellers heading up the biggest U.S. banks and therefore with the resources to supply the controlling capital in the U.S. war industry, putting them in position to shape U.S. foreign policy to protect their imperialist interests abroad.

During the Vietnam genocide of the 1960s and 1970s, James and David Rockefeller personally headed the ancestors of Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase. Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York and later became U.S. vice-president. David Rockefeller ran U.S. imperialism’s most influential policy foundry as president of the Council on Foreign Relations; its most influential university as president of Harvard’s overseers; and its most influential “philanthropies,” the various Rockefeller foundations.

The Koch brothers’ challenge to this mammoth empire puts them into a fierce dogfight with the world’s most powerful capitalists, a battle over who can exploit the most workers. The Rockefellers have been reaping super-profits from workers on five continents. The Koch brothers were behind the attack on Wisconsin’s state workers and teachers that cut their wages, benefits and bargaining rights. The only interest the working class has in this fight is to overthrow both sides with communist revolution.

Depression Intensifies Racism As Basis of Capitalist Super-profits

A Pew Research analysis (7/26/11) “shows the racial and ethnic impact of the economic meltdown, which ravaged housing values and sent unemployment soaring.” (AP, 7/26)

The net worth of black households in 2009 at $5,677 was one-twentieth of that of white households. For Latino households at $6,325 it was one-eighteenth.

From 2005 to 2009, Latino household net worth declined by 66%. Black household net worth shrank by 56% over that period. Much of this was due to their home equity losses, both from home foreclosures and plummeting home values, as well as double unemployment rates.

The Pew Research report also found that 35% of black households had zero or negative net worth. For Latino households it was 31%.

Said Roderick Harrison, former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau, “Typically in recessions, minorities suffer from being last hired and first fired. They are likely to lose jobs more rapidly at the beginning of a recession, and are far slower to gain jobs as the economy recovers.”

Across all groups, “the wealth gap between rich and poor widened. The share of wealth held by the top 10% of U.S. households increased from 49% in 2005 to 56% in 2009.”