If tomorrow the sanitation workers were to go on strike, it would rapidly create a crisis. The same would be true if bus, rail and airline workers struck, or farm workers and food distribution workers, or healthcare workers, or dock and warehouse workers, or teachers and other education workers, or utility repair workers — and the list goes on and on.
But if Jeff Bezos, said now to be the richest person in the world, doesn’t show up at Amazon tomorrow or next week or next year, if would have zero impact on operations. The same goes for Bill Gates at Microsoft, or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Donald Trump likes to brag that he built hotels and resorts all over the world. He didn’t. It was thousands of construction workers, architects and engineers with a vast array of necessary skills who did the actual work.
The billionaire owners and investors actually play no role in the production of goods or services, but they take all the profits. Despite being glorified daily in a mass media owned by their fellow capitalists, they are in fact parasites. According to a report from the organization Oxfam in January 2019, just 26 of them own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population, 3.7 billion people!
That same media and right-wing politicians sell the myth of “rugged individualism,” the idea that we could all be rich if we just worked hard enough. In the real world, millions of workers who have the hardest jobs get paid the least. And most of the super-wealthy, like Trump, are billionaires because their fathers were millionaires. At the same time, the poorest groups in the country are Native and African American people, whose stolen land and centuries of unpaid forced labor respectively were the essential foundation of the capitalist system.
The corporate media and the class they serve have a vested interest in hiding the fact that in our society working people are all dependent on each other. If workers in any major sector of the economy disappeared tomorrow, the whole system would quickly begin to break down. All work is necessary and all work has dignity, including labor done at home primarily by women workers that is not compensated at all.
We live in a highly integrated system and economy which is completely run by workers. We produce everything in the way of goods and services necessary to sustain life in the 21st century, while the capitalist owners produce nothing.
Bigoted politicians and much of the mass media promote divisions among working people. The Party for Socialism and Liberation stands for and promotes solidarity among all workers regardless of nationality, gender, sexual orientation or religion/non-religion. All work has dignity and all workers deserve respect.
The capitalists control the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, and government at every level.
They make the laws that protect their property and profits as the highest priority. It’s a government of, by and for the rich at the expense of the people and the planet. They wage war after war, at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars. Their system is protected by a racist, anti-working class police/court/prison system.
The deep problems we face cannot be solved within the existing system. We need a new system, a socialist system where the great wealth created by working people is owned and controlled by working people. We need a socialist, planned economy which meets needs of the people of the world in a long-term, sustainable way.
On this May Day, International Workers Day 2019, we say: Workers Make the World Run – Workers Should Run the World! If you agree, join us!
