To US workers: ‘Only class politics can save us from the rampaging monopolists’
The looting of countries abroad and the forcing down of pay and conditions at home are both caused by the same drive for maximum profit.
This message was addressed to the members of Caleb Maupin’s Centre for Political Innovation, who held a conference in Austin, Texas on 12 March 2022.
On behalf of the Communists of Britain, I bring our warmest greetings to all the comrades meeting in Texas this weekend.
We wish your event great success and hope very much that it will be a useful step in the process of reorganising the US working class for socialism.
We are being given fresh proofs that this reorganisation is desperately needed on a yearly, a monthly, and even on a daily basis.
The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted just how brutally unequal our society is, and how unfit monopoly capitalism is to take care of even the most basic needs of the people.
Today, we are being given fresh proofs of the need to rid ourselves of the rule of monopoly capital. We see how capitalist production entrenches and widens inequality from day to day.
And we see how in the drive to win the battle of competition, and in a desperate bid to escape the inescapable economic crisis their system has created, our rulers are constantly driven to war.
Wars for domination and control. Wars for resources and markets. Wars to stamp out rivals or impediments to the extraction of maximum profit.
As I record this message, 30 years of slow-motion aggression against Russia have finally led the Russians to take action in Ukraine – not to start World War 3 but to try to prevent it if at all possible by removing the huge stockpiles of weapons that the west has planted on Ukrainian territory and by disarming the Nazi gangs whom the west harboured all through the cold war, who were replanted into the country after the fall of the USSR, and who have been receiving imperialist weapons and training for the last decade and more.
Why did the Nato countries do all this? Why are they so set on wiping out Russia and China? It’s because just by existing as independent economic and political entities Russia and China are an impediment to the monopolists’ drive to make maximum profits.
Not only that, but by offering development aid or military backing, Russia and China are able to help other, poorer countries to break free of the imperialist chains as well.
Russia and China may be a threat to the expansion of monopoly capital – for capital must expand or die. But they are not a threat to workers in the USA, in Britain, or anywhere else.
Our interests are not those of our rulers. In fact, our interests are diametrically opposed to theirs.
Our interest is in the weakening and destruction of the rule of the monopolists, whose colossal power stands on two feet: one of those feet presses down heavily on the oppressed countries, but the other is planted here at home.
The same drive for maximum profit is what pushes down our wages and our pensions, forces us to work longer hours for worse pay, destroys our public services, prices our children out of education or leaves them with a mountain of debt that they will be servicing forever.
The same drive for maximum profit is what forces the closure of factories and the moving of production to where land, materials and labour are cheap and profits high.
The same drive for maximum profit is what makes our governments treat a health crisis as a business opportunity, following the path that is most advantageous to monopoly capital rather than the one that saves the most lives and brings the pandemic to a quick and effective close.
The drive for maximum profit is what leads to unemployment, to homelessness, to hunger in the midst of plenty, to the rampaging of preventable acute and chronic diseases, to environmental degradation, to racism and to war.
Only planned production can solve these problems, which all seem so intractable while the monopolists remain in power and the wealth of humanity remains concentrated in their hands.
And only class politics can organise us to be able to fight effectively to achieve a socialist society with a planned economy.
To free the people of the United States from the rule of the neoliberal empire – the rule of the rampaging monopolists, the market fundamentalists – workers must organise and they must unite the maximum possible numbers on the basis of their class.
They must study and learn from the works of the founders of scientific socialism, and they must take every opportunity to popularise its core messages and to connect them with the wider working class.
Our enemy is strong, but ultimately, with the power of truth on our side: with science, with organisation and with numbers, we are stronger.
In the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
