The Coronavirus Pandemic Has US Capitalism on Edge. Only Temporary relief Please.

Reports of tension in the big stores as panic sets in

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

"Capitalism teaches the people the moral conceptions of cannibalism are the strong devouring the weak; its theory of the world of men and women is that of a glorified pig-trough where the biggest swine gets the most swill.” James Conolly.

One thing we need to get in to our heads in a period of crisis when the mass capitalist media’s rallying call is “were all in this together”, is that we’re not all in this together.  It sounds very impressive that the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley have been meeting with government officials to solve the COVID-19 problems from how to stop and in “predicting how many hospital beds are available at any given time.”

We can be sure that the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and all of their class allies, will make sure that any costly measures that they have to adopt in this emergency will be passed on to the working class in some way.  If you want to thank any force in society for the hospital beds we have now thank the nurses and their union that has been in the fore front of the struggle for a respectable nurse to patient ratio.

The emergency measures contained in the coronavirus relief bill passed last Friday, like paying sick leave to workers forced to stay home or the extension of jobless benefits and so forth are not arising due to the generosity of these social parasites. They are a necessity to head off a potential social upheaval of unprecedented proportions. Nothing the U.S has experienced in the post war era.

For the poor among us, the states are requesting approval from the federal government to “dole out” emergency food stamps and waive work requirements. Mind you, it’s hard to find work when the government tells you to stay home. This sort of relief is “a proper role for government” in a crisis, the Wall Street Journal tells us. It has to be, as the private sector will not do so. In 2008 US capitalism was pulled back from the abyss by the US taxpayer and other global victims of this global leader. Don’t forget it was the US taxpayer that rescued the Savings and Loan debacle when the government nationalized the debt it had accumulated.

Representing the class and strategic interests and fears of US capitalism, the Journal recognizes through its own experiences that some things made to be temporary end up being permanent, just like taxes they impose on the rest of us that ensure society functions. “The political temptation will be to make them permanent.”, the Journal warns the US body politic. What this capitalist journal means here is that once the working class realizes that things like sick leave and other benefits don’t have to take 150 years to materialize, what is in actuality returning to the working class the wealth we create in the form of social services, giving them up may not be so easy

Extending jobless benefits another 26 weeks, (in states where unemployment is over 10%), is OK as long as it ends when the epidemic “ebbs” the Journal says. And here’s an aspect of their thinking we workers must mull over as it reveals how the Masters of the Universe as they were once described, really see us; what they really believe to be true about how working people think and behave:

“If the epidemic ebbs sooner rather than later, extended jobless benefits could discourage unemployed workers from seeking work and delay the economic recovery.”

They think we are like them, that we mirror their world view. But human consciousness, while influenced by many things, is in the last analysis rooted in the material world. And our role in production is the soil of mass class consciousness.  As Marx once wrote: “The way people get their living determines their social outlook.”  And despite the conscious efforts to isolate us from one another and workers of each nation from one another, we work collectively day in day out. We work in factories, stores, hospitals, Wal Mart and Home Depot. Millions work in Starbucks and in nursing homes and care centers and so on. So collectivism, solidarity and class unity is a very strong drive among us. It has been weakened but it cannot be eradicated.

Not only is unemployment pay too low to afford us the privilege of not working for long, working people want to be productive. As human beings its important for us to produce and be creative. Capitalism is alienating, ant-social, that is why work is so often drudgery. Our life activity, the labor process is not ours; our life activity, (labor power) is bought by the owners of capital for their use. The owners of capital direct this activity and determine what it is used for. The end product of this activity is not ours, we do not posses the object that our labor power has created or partially created. In the case of assembly line work this is alienating in the extreme as the belt never stops, it’s as if we never complete anything going home at the end of the day and the belt is still running when we return in the morning.

So this mouthpiece of capital wants to ensure that workers work, otherwise the economy won’t recover.  They never mention profits. It’s profits, or surplus value that they are concerned about. The labor process produces more value than the workers are paid for in wages.  They don’t send us home when we have produced enough value in widgets to pay us for time worked. What workers produce above our own wages is surplus value and part of that surplus value is the source of the capitalist’s wealth. This is the predominant reason capitalists buy wage labor. Capital cannot function without exploiting wage labor. Capitalists are not misers as Marx pointed out.

If the Wall Street Journal or the capitalist class in general cared about workers being employed there’s be no need for unemployment benefits. If they cared about putting people to work they would lower the workweek to two or three days a week, and hire more unemployed. But they don’t hire workers or put people to work as a social service, as an egalitarian contribution to society; their one and only goal is surplus value and their rapacious quest for profits. People starve in Africa and throughout the world not because we can’t feed them but because it’s not profitable to do so.

I am not an economist and no expert in that field in any way. I don’t think we have to read the three volumes of capital to understand or benefit from Marx’s explanation of how capitalism works, why it goes in to crisis and so forth; some of us will as occurs in all fields of study. But we can grasp the general processes at work. Before delving in to this area like most workers I simply believed profits arose from buying cheap and selling dear. Or the capitalist was simply a greedy person. I thought higher wages would automatically lead to higher prices.

But if we understand the source of profit as unpaid human labor power, that and the contradictions that ensure capitalism is a system of never ending crisis, we won’t get lost.

We know in our gut that the “man” is rotten, that we live in an exploitive and rotten system. But we don’t understand it scientifically. Christianity, the religion in which I was raised, teaches us that we are born bad. Ask yourself which class of people that philosophy benefits.

Once it becomes clear how capitalist society exploits workers and how they get rich and so on, the idea that in a time of crisis like this, when, for their own interests, the super rich are forced to take measures that they are presently taking, we know without hesitation they will undoubtedly make every effort using the government that they control to ensure that they get that money back. That’s why they are concerned about the response from the working class when this crisis ebbs.

The Dow fell another 3000 points I read just now. This is of grave concern to the capitalists as their system is very unstable is already weakened. They are terrified of their own working class don’t let their mass media fool you.  And if you are in a union consider the disgusting silence from the heads of organized labor and take measures, become active in the struggle within organized labor to change the present course of our organizations and the leadership that has failed us time and time again. There are many articles on this blog on labor issues.

The tech billionaires meeting with their politicians will ensure that they make plenty of money from this crisis. Remember it was Obama’s pal, Rahm Emmanuel who said that a good crisis should never go to waste. The pharmaceutical companies, the tech, energy and other dominant sectors of the economy must be taken in to public ownership and a planned rational system of production based on need and not profit has to arise. This is the only alternative. And we should remind ourselves as a friend in Detroit reminded me Saturday, that there was another period when the productive forces were directed in a different way, and that was for the war effort in 1940. Production was re-tooled for producing the needs of aging war.

I was once told that conscious tends to lag behind events, and this is true. We will see some major political and social changes arise form this global catastrophe.