Vol. 71/No. 48      December 24, 2007

The roots of the rulers’ crisis lie in the three-decade-long stagnation of their rate of capital accumulation, which has intensified competition between capitalists on a world scale. To maximize profits they have invested in whatever they think will bring the quickest returns. Increasingly they have speculated in debt, creating enormous bubbles of fictitious capital that guarantee disaster when they burst. This is what the plummet in home prices and mushrooming mortgage defaults are headed toward at some point.

The lending profiteers lured workers and middle-class people with little or no credit into buying homes with subprime mortgages. They offered them the “American dream” of “owning your own home.” They were told they would be secure for life.

But there is no security under capitalism, as the plight of millions now losing their homes demonstrates. Working people are homeowners in name only, becoming chained further to debt slavery. What’s more, bosses prefer that workers buy homes, counting on the conservatizing effects that go along with losing mobility and identifying as “property owners.”

The housing crisis—ever-rising rents or mortgage payments—is only part of the picture, and not even the main problem for our class. As the economic crisis deepens, the employers will be driven to squeeze more profits from our labor. They will continue to speed up the production line, cut wages, and gut health and pension benefits. The bosses’ parties will push for deeper cuts in Social Security and other social gains of the labor movement. They will expand their wars worldwide in their drive for resources and markets.

The root of the problem is the class-divided capitalist system. A tiny class of super-wealthy families owns the factories, mines, banks, and land, and controls the state apparatus. Workers produce the wealth—and the employers take it, pushing us increasingly to the wall.

Working people can counter these disastrous consequences only by our own collective resistance. This begins with solidarity: fighting together to defend workers and farmers in face of declining living and job conditions, rising joblessness, and ruinous bursts of inflation. It begins with organizing unions, and using union power to resist speed-up, enforce job safety, and combat assaults on wages and hours of work.

Through struggles such as these, more and more workers will recognize the pressing need to break with the twin capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans, and form a labor party based on the trade unions.

Along this road workers can build a revolutionary movement that will lead a fight to take state power out of the hands of the capitalist class and establish a workers and farmers government.
 
 
Related articles:
Gov’t home loan ‘aid’ plan will protect banks
Millions will continue to face foreclosure
What drives capitalism’s long-term economic crisis?  
 
 
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