Politics for the Working Class

I decided to start this blog in the hopes of having broad discussions with working class folks about the future of our planet and our role as working people in fighting for our future. I have absolutely zero experience at blogging so please forgive me in advance for any errors.

So, what are Politics for the working Americans, and just who are these working Americans? The reference to working class is essentially a means of making a rather broad distinction between those that either recieve a paycheck or could potentially recieve one and those who live on their wealth or the wealth accumulated by their family; so whether employed, unemployed, underemployed, self-employed or employed partime or on a contingency basis, your input is desired. It doesn't matter if you are a citizen of the US or another country, your input is desired.

In essence, the experience and thinking of all working people in the United States is welcome on this site.

The American economy is on the verge of collapse; and that collapse will involve the global economy. While many will recall the 1929 Crash, I posit that when the economy crashes, the impact will be ten thousand times more severe. The recent "seizure" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and now the bail out of AIG represent the beginning of what many economists and students of the science of society have known for decades.

Why will this crash be different from the crash of 1929? After the crash of 1929, the economy had room to expand and grow. In large part based on the US entering WWII. Entering the war presented an opportunity for the US to re-tool itself and gear up for a war-based economy which provided the basis for the recovery of the world economy.

The New Deal championed by Roosevelt created the basis for labor peace with the development of the 1935 National Labor Relations Board, to legally handle labor disputes as opposed to the workers fighting it out on the shop floors or in the streets, thereby laying the foundation for the
legal based trade union movement that has been truncated over the past several decades.

The application of the new mechanical pickers revolutionized crop production but also pushed millions of farmers, sharecroppers and farm laborers off the land and into factories and plants in urban areas. At the same time it also laid the basis for the African American liberation movement. On the one hand, black soldiers learned about fighting for the liberation of others on foriegn soil and they would never again look at America in the same way and on the other hand the millions of black sharecroppers who were forced off the land were exposed to the possibility of equality.

Today, this new digitalized technology has reached into every hamlet and hovel across the globe. This technology is different from the technologies of the past which was labor-saving, that is, it was technology that joined with the worker to make the work a bit easier. But that technology while it pushed millions off the land, it also was the basis for the Industrial Age. Those who were not absorbed became part of the permanent poor and unemployed, creating for the first time in American history a class of permanently unemployed made up primarily of the African American who now took over the slums and ghettos of our urban cities.

Today's technology does not join with the workers it actually replaces them. So what happens when we have labor replacing technology at the same time we have technology that can produce in absolute abundance? The result is a growing pool of workers who have little or no relationship to work. It also means that this technology which forces "markets" i.e. nations, to jettison their social contracts also has created an entire world of workers who subsist on pennies a day and whose overall incomes fall to the level of the robot....zero!

Given the tremendous productive capacity of this technology it means that for the first time in the history of humanity we will increasingly have production without labor which means we must demand distribution of the necessaries of life without money.

So, what then are the possibilities? What is necessary in order to ensure that the majority of us are not ground into the ground, destitute and facing the loss of our civil liberties, while politicians call for more de-regulation, some regulation, or whatever?

Today, it is not about anyones ideology, today there is a very practical demand on which we can all unite which is that this technology must not be privately owned the corporations, but it must be publically owned so that all can enjoy.

It also means that everything now depends on working people fighting in their own interests and not the interests of the parties of the ruling class. It means that we must demand that the necessaries of life are publically owned. It means that we must demand that the necessaries of life are distributed not based on money but to everyone based on need. It means that we must have our own political independence as working people.

In beauty shops, nail salons, schools, churches, lodges, neighborhoods, libraries, book clubs, sororities, fraternities, unions, any and everyplace we gather, we must talk about our future and what is possible.