One million reasons capitalism has to go

While the federal government is doling out trillions to the banks, on this issue it has done practically nothing. In Fairfax County in Virginia, three social workers are assigned to provide arrangements for the district’s 1,800 homeless children. In New York City, the school system does not even provide inter-borough busing so that homeless children who are forced to relocate to other shelters can continue to attend the same school. In Buncombe County in western North Carolina, a single liaison tries to sort out transportation for 239 homeless children in the 700-square-mile district.

According to pro-capitalist ideology, the competitive, for-profit economy rewards those with the most talent and personal drive. Those who work hardest will get ahead; those who do not work will fall behind. The country’s 1 million homeless schoolchildren offer 1 million rebuttals to this bogus doctrine.

In heavily disproportionate terms, these children will drop out of school, be harassed by the criminal justice system and end up incarcerated. Those that are able to join the workforce are most likely to do so at the very bottom of the pay scale, receiving poverty wages. What have they done to receive a life of hardship and incredibly difficult odds? Nothing. Most simply had the misfortune of growing up poor in a society divided by classes—where one class’s wealth grows due to the labor of the other. Hundreds of thousands are newly poor because one of their parents lost their job in the last year, leading the family into eviction or foreclosure. Because capitalism provides no guarantee to a basic income or living standard, they have been plunged into poverty.

The corporate media occasionally talks about the “marginalized” sector of our class—as if the problem were that some people have not been sufficiently included in the economic system. In fact, the large numbers of unemployed and homeless are already part of the system. There is nothing accidental about the growing homelessness and misery of the country’s working class. The unemployed form what Karl Marx called an “industrial reserve army”—a population of workers waiting to be enlisted in the next available job. Having this army of workers in reserve allows the capitalists to keep wages low; with a scarcity of jobs, they know their workers will accept just about any wage they can get.

As capitalism develops new technologies and methods to extract more profits out of our day’s work, relatively fewer workers are needed overall. Thus, the advanced capitalist countries produce an ever-growing polarization of wealth, and a growing sector of homeless and permanently unemployed.　

In 1867, Karl Marx wrote in Capital (Volume 1, Chapter 25): “The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labor-power at its disposal. … But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labor-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labor. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers [or “bottom layers”-Ed.] of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism.

This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances…”

This is the free-market system: where one tiny group of people is “free” to parasitically suck profits out of the vast majority, and a growing number of workers is “free” to starve, get evicted and barely scrape by.

Do we even need to say it? We need a new system.