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Vol. 74/No. 5      February 8, 2010

 
Working-class answers to crisis
(editorial)
 
President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address January 27, marking the first year of his presidency. For the working class and farmers 2009 has been a year of escalating war, rising unemployment, more deportations, a decline in quality and access to health care, attacks on Constitutional rights and protections, housing and farm foreclosures, and a deteriorating standard of living. Blacks and other oppressed nationalities have fared worse than others.

The capitalist government in Washington, and on the local level, has no answers to the deepening economic and social crisis that is devastating the lives of millions of workers worldwide. The newly elected Republican senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, has taken the spotlight for a moment after winning the office previously held by Democratic Party politician Edward Kennedy. But what are Brown’s proposals to reverse the effects of the economic crisis on working people? Like other politicians in the two capitalist parties, he has none that will benefit workers.

The only answers to the devastation that working people face are those that directly cut into the capitalists’ profits and ultimately challenge the dictatorship of capital. The crisis of unemployment, for example, can only begin to be addressed by a massive public works program to repair infrastructure, build schools, hospitals, affordable housing, and other socially needed projects—putting millions to work.

The ruling families of the United States and other capitalist nations use the power of their state to defend their system and their profits no matter what the consequences for us. That is why working people need a proletarian dictatorship to replace the rule of capital.

The introduction to Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power aptly explains, “Only the conquest, and exercise, of state power by the working class and expropriation of finance capital can lay the foundations for a world based not on exploitation, violence, racial discrimination, class-based pecking orders, and dog-eat-dog competition, but on solidarity among working people that encourages the creativity and recognition of the worth of every individual, regardless of sex, national origin, or skin color.

“A socialist world.”
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. rulers prepare deeper social cuts
Workers face more economic uncertainty
Canada: Joblessness still high in so-called recovery
Major U.S. banks report gigantic profits for 2009  
 
 
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