The following was delivered by PSL member Peta Lindsay during the Opening Plenary of the National Conference on Socialism 2010 held in Los Angeles on Nov. 13 – Nov. 14.
 Photo: Bill Hackwell |
It’s really terrific to see so many of our members, our comrades, our friends here with us today in Los Angeles at this, the second national conference of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
This is an amazing opportunity for the Party and other progressive activists to meet together to assess, analyze, discuss and strategize for the coming struggles inside the United States and to deepen our appreciation of the class struggle and the anti-imperialist movements that are raging on all continents—with the possible exception of Antarctica.
The word socialism has been particularly in the news in the last two years. One might expect that to be the case given the fact that socialism is the only fundamental economic alternative to the capitalist social order. And the capitalist social order has demonstrated its absurdity and its cruelty on a magnitude unseen at least in Western countries for the past 70 years.
The capitalist economic system in the past two years has not created jobs. In fact, 8 million jobs have been lost in the last two years and the real number of unemployed people is now about 30 million. Thirty million people who are out of jobs or have stopped looking for work because they can’t find a job or are so underemployed—that is, barely working—that they are virtually unemployed.
It has not put more people in homes; on the contrary, 9 million families have either been foreclosed or are under the threat of being foreclosed and driven from their homes.
The number of people who can’t go to a doctor when they’re sick because they lack basic healthcare insurance has not decreased in the last two years; it has increased by 4 million. That’s right: the number of uninsured people is now 51 million.
The number of people in poverty is also reaching record levels. The number of children living in poverty is almost 1 out of 4 in the United States, and that’s using the official poverty statistics, which are nothing but a bad joke. For instance, if you’re a family of four and make $22,000 a year, you are not poor enough to be listed as in poverty. The number of African American children living in poverty is one out of every two.
Capitalism is touted by its apologists as the most dynamic, productive force in human history—they argue that this shows its validity as a social system. Even and despite its admitted injustices, capitalism has in fact not been a stimulator of more production, of more jobs, of more economic security and well being, but on the contrary has led to vast unemployment, homelessness, foreclosures, evictions, plant closings, city closings and town closings.
Many of us here today are coming from cities and towns that have taken devastating hits from the capitalist economic system. We see the decay every day and most of us have gotten used to it. The run down public schools, the empty factories and warehouses, the public hospital closures and the increasing numbers of people, fellow members of our class, who are now living on the street.
Yes, sisters and brothers, if we look at the vast human catastrophe caused by the capitalist economic system in the last two years, it would be normal and natural for socialism to become a focus of public discussion.
But, ironically, we are not hearing the word socialism in the last two years in the corporate media because of the obvious bankruptcy of modern-day capitalism. No, socialism has entered the popular vocabulary once again as a curse, as an epithet, as a point of allegation and accusation against the current administration by the so-called Tea Party and the other ultra-rightists.
The absurdity of anti-communism and anti-socialism, which has, in the United States, for the last 60 years, taken on the shape of a kind of unofficial religion, is evidenced by the fact that the ultra-right uses the allegation of “socialism” against the current U.S. President, Barack Obama. The Obama administration is a pro-capitalist, pro-business, pro-banking, pro-war administration, yet they still accuse him of “trying to take the country towards socialism” every time his administration introduces even the most timid reforms that may have even the slightest impact on the profit margins of the major banks, corporations and insurance companies.
Sisters and brothers, I can tell you as a founding member o the Party for Socialism and Liberation, as someone who believes in the principles of socialism, as articulated by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and countless other revolutionary socialists throughout history, the Obama administration can be called many things, but it cannot be called socialist. Obama is not trying to take the country towards socialism. We are.
From our point of view, the struggle against capitalism and for its only alternative—socialism—is a life and death struggle. Unless economic and political power is removed from the hands of the capitalist class, tens of millions of people will be perpetually unemployed. Working class families will be driven from their homes because they are no longer able to pay their mortgage or their rent.
Unless we have a socialist government, a government of, by and for the people, a government that produces goods and services not for profit for the few but to meet human and societal needs of many, unless we have that kind of economic and governmental organization, the environmental catastrophe that we are witnessing globally will dynamically develop to a new tipping point.
The unemployed are unemployed not because they don’t want to work, nor is it because the goods and services produced by their labor are not desperately needed by society. The reason the unemployed will remain jobless is that the capitalists would rather keep the millions unemployed as a reserve army of labor than guarantee them a job at a living wage.
Labor is employed by the private capitalists for one purpose only: not to produce products needed by society, but to produce products that can be sold at a profit for the capitalist owners.
If it wasn’t for the imperative need of the capitalists to make profits for them and their investors, every unemployed person could be given a job today. They could help rebuild the bridges that are in disrepair, to create mass transit infrastructure to help the country move, to build schools and hospitals, provide childcare and healthcare, to provide all of the goods and services that are desperately needed by the working class in our society today.
At the same time as capitalism is driving workers from their homes, cutting their wages, laying them off of jobs, driving working class youth out of college through steep tuition hikes, there is one sector that continues to thrive: the production of weapons.
Weapons, armaments and the other instruments of war are a fundamental feature of contemporary capitalism. Every generation is sent to war by the U.S. government. The military-industrial complex is a permanent feature. The real level of military spending in the United States is about $1 trillion a year, more than all the other countries of the world combined. The U.S. spends $1.2 billion every two days to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. It maintains 750 military bases located in 130 countries.
Just think of it—since 1940, the U.S. has been engaged in one war after another: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq again. U.S. capitalism is synonymous with endless war and it didn’t just start with George W. Bush.
Capitalism appears to be a dying system, but like all oppressive social orders, capitalism will not die by itself. It must be uprooted. It must be replaced, through the agency of revolution, by a new social order.
There already exists many organizations in the United States that do many progressive, valuable things. Unions exist to defend the wages and benefits of workers. There are civil rights organizations that defend and promote the issues of equality. There are separate organizations that work on behalf of the immigrant workers community, LGBT communities, women and people of each and every nationality.
We are involved with and support all organizations that are fighting to support and defend the interests of the people. But a political party like the PSL is not just one of these groups. It is our understanding, our belief, our conviction that all of the manifestations of oppression and exploitation and war are byproducts not of the failed individual policies or mistakes made by certain political leaders. Rather, they are the organic extension of the capitalist economic system itself.
There is a class struggle raging in the United States. Many of you have heard the name Warren Buffet, the billionaire who is worshipped by the mass media as some kind of all-knowing sage. Even he explained: “There is class warfare all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” So that, sisters and brothers, is why the PSL exists—to help unite the working class and provide leadership, so that this class war can be turned around.
The bankers and corporate bosses, the generals and the cops are united in militantly defending their own system. Of course, since they can’t make their system work they have been engaged in a lot of finger-pointing and shifting the blame of late. But the PSL aims to be the organization that unites various sectors of the working class and takes up the struggle on every front, always understanding that each individual struggle is a battle in this class war.
The PSL is an organization that’s committed to revolutionary change, that’s unafraid to call things as they are, and to provide a political program that points a way out of the protracted social, economic and military crisis that are the dominant features of the modern order.
The capitalists may appear to be all powerful, but really, sisters and brothers, it is the working class, those who do the all the work, who have the real power. In fact, there is no power greater than the working class once that class has been mobilized to take action in their own interests. If the bosses don’t come to work on Monday morning no one will know the difference. But if the workers don’t come to work, the trains and subways do not run, the ships are not unloaded, the garbage is not picked up, the cars don’t come off the assembly line. Without the working class, nothing moves.
When the workers finally do act, and they will act, as they must, then the capitalist bourgeoisie, those who do no productive labor but who own, appear not as an omnipotent, dominating force, but as they should appear: an inconsequential and parasitic social force that provides nothing of value to society.
So welcome to the National Conference of the PSL, sisters and brothers. We are looking forward to two full days of important discussion and strategizing. We are building this party, a revolutionary party, a party that will make socialism a household word in the United States, not as a smear, not as a curse, not as an expletive, but as the force for real social change and for human liberation.
