Good afternoon. I would like to welcome everybody to May Day 2008. I don’t know if everyone realizes this, but May Day is a very special day. It is the day that the Progressive Labor Party celebrates the history of workers fighting back around the world against the bosses. I was asked to speak today about the state of the world. Now whenever someone asks me if I want the good news or the bad news first, I always say the bad news so that we can get it out of the way. So here it goes.
The bad news is we are still living under capitalism, a system based solely on the ruling class profiting off of the exploitation, suffering and misery of the working class. The good news is as the working class, we have the ability to analyze the system we live under so that we can destroy it and create a communist society that is based on the needs of our class. I am going to attempt to use the next 10 minutes or so to give an analysis of the world situation so that we can understand how to change it.
Through the study of dialectical materialism, a philosophy based on science, we know that inter-imperialist rivalry is the main contradiction in the world right now. It drives everything that happens around the globe. Now this may sound complicated, but in essence, it just means that the fight between competing imperialist countries for resources, labor and markets shapes the events that occur in our lives. Everything from the Iraq war to the budget cuts in our schools happens because of the struggle by the US to remain the dominant power in the world.
The United States is just beginning to be challenged by rival imperialist powers. Over the past 10 years, Russia has built a number of oil pipelines extending into Europe and Asia. Just last year, the New York Times reported that Russia provides parts of Europe with a third of its oil and 40% of its natural gas. The European Union’s large dependency on Russia for natural resources definitely affects the relationship of imperialist powers. Russia has also recently been strengthening their relationship with Iran and Venezuela through arms deals which gives them a foot in the Middle East and South America as well.
Similarly, China had the highest economic growth rate in the world during the 1990’s, tripled their military spending since 2000 and invested in various countries throughout Africa and South America, namely Nigeria, Argentina and Brazil. Since the US bosses have been tied up in the Iraq war, China has been able to build relationships with countries throughout Latin America that the US has let slip away. All these developments are important because they put Russia and China in a stronger position to eventually put up a fight for the top spot in the world and as we all know it will be the working class who is sent to war for the bosses’ power struggle.
In addition to Russia and China, the US now has an economic problem to worry about. Now I by no means claim to be an economist, so I am definitely going to give the short version of this crisis. The capitalist system always looks for ways to maximize profit. Since the US cannot continue to make this profit through investment in productive labor, the ruling class has turned to other routes of investment.
Most recently these investments were in the housing market. For a couple of years this created a boom in the housing market and large profits for banks. But all good materialists know that everything has its limits and the housing market is no exception. The boom turned into a bust and this helped to create the current financial crisis and recession that we see today. Let’s be clear though. It was not the banks who paid for these losses but rather the working class. Last year, in the month of November alone, there were over 200,000 foreclosed properties. That is 200,000 working class families whose lives were destroyed by this vicious capitalist system all in the name of profit.
The important thing to remember here is that the capitalists will always take their losses out on the workers. In the month of March alone, 80,000 jobs were eliminated by employers across the country. Workers at a tile factory in Ohio are earning $450 a week instead of the usual $600 because of a cut back in hours. Workers who thought their jobs were stable are seeing increased attempts to cut wages, benefits and pensions. The New York City schools’ budget was snatched literally overnight. So you see when the bosses are in crisis, they simply tighten their grip on the working class.
When speaking about the problems in the economy, one cannot ignore the one trillion dollars that has been spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even with all of that money, the military is still breaking. The recent troop surge and the 140,000 contracted mercenaries in Iraq expose the fact that the military is overall still unsuccessful in stabilizing their position in Iraq. They also have been unable to rely on Iraqi security forces. Just last month, 1,000 Iraqi soldiers deserted their mission of fighting in Basra. The Iraq war is an attempt by the ruling class to strengthen their imperialist hold over the Middle East, but they are failing miserably.
As the US continues to find better ways to commit genocide, we have already seen the deaths of 4,000 US troops and 100,000 Iraqi civilians. Countless people have suffered debilitating injuries. 30% of the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have sought help for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and we know that there are many more who have not reached out.
As word of these horrors spread and over 1,000,000 soldiers have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan, the military is facing a serious crisis of having the bodies to send to war. Fewer soldiers reenlist even with the huge bonuses offered and new recruits are hard to find. This problem has resulted in the majority of soldiers having deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan at least 3 times already with some having been as many as 5 times. Deployments have been extended and there is less time at home before redeployment.
All of this adds up to a huge problem for the ruling class. If they cannot sustain a strong military in the face of a minor war such as Iraq and Afghanistan, how will they be able to fight the inevitable larger wars due to inter-imperialist rivalry? Again when the bosses see trouble they respond by cracking down on us. This is where the Dream Act and proposals for a new draft come in. With all the racism the ruling class pushes about undocumented workers, they have no problem using them to field their military. With the promise of citizenship, thousands of young immigrants have been forced into the military as their only option. At the high school I teach at, there is a large immigrant population and the military recruiters are there everyday enticing students with Army Day at the paintball range and promising them that all their dreams will come true once they enlist.
So on one side of the coin, immigrants can join the military and become happy citizens like the rest of us. If you don’t want to, you get the other side of the coin: legalized terror against immigrants and the Minutemen militia. Immigrants will not be the only ones to suffer from this racist terror. Unfortunately, the average working class person has been sucked into the patriotic garbage that immigrants are ruining "our" country. Instead of recognizing our common thread of us all being exploited by the ruling class, we are tricked into believing that they are "the other". So while immigrants are being rounded up and detained, black workers are reminded by the Jena Six, the slaughter of Sean Bell and the acquittal of the racist murdering cops that they are still just as much the targets of this racist system as immigrant workers are.
All of these problems add up to capitalism in crisis. In order to maintain the system, the US has begun to implement fascism. Fascism and democracy are two forms of capitalism and the ruling class uses the form they need based on their strength or weakness at the time. Because of the US’s current weaknesses, we have begun to see bits of fascism in all aspects of life. From cops, metal detectors and recruiters in the schools to the Patriot Act to immigration reform, workers cannot escape the expansion of fascism.
So where is the hope? Well the ruling class would like us to believe it is in the 2008 elections. On Obama’s website, he is quoted "I’m asking you to believe not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours." This is the essence of this year’s election, to reinvigorate faith in the system. The ruling class is desperately attempting to channel our anger to the polls as if choosing between Hillary and Obama is a real choice. As always, we are led to believe that the liberal Democrats will make things better for the working class. Yet the last Democrat in office, Bill Clinton, eliminated welfare leaving millions of working class families starving and homeless and murdered one million Iraqi workers with imposed sanctions.
So in reality, we see the two parties and their candidates are much more the same than different. There are contracts on the bases in Iraq for the next twenty years. So McCain’s claim of having soldiers in Iraq for the next 100 years is much more accurate than the "responsible withdrawal" that the Democrats are claiming. Obama has called to "renew American leadership around the world" starting with a "revitalization" of the US military which will include an increase of 92,000 troops for the Army and Marines. So after the elections the genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue, the racist terror will continue, cutbacks will continue. Obama’s theme for his campaign is change, but historically real change has only come from revolution. So the bad news is this election will be no different than any other election because no candidate will smash this capitalist system that creates all of the horrors I have been talking about. The good news is that Progressive Labor Party and the working class will.