WWP conference will show ‘Capitalism has no way out’

The Workers World Party 50th anniversary conference will take place in New York City Nov. 14-15. A major focus of the gathering will be the global capitalist economic crisis and the great need to intensify the prosecution of the worldwide class struggle.

Current struggles for national liberation on almost every continent, including Afghanistan, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Philippines, Somalia and Palestine, along with the growing mass struggles for jobs, health care, housing and education at home, will be analyzed within the context of this crisis.

Understanding how the restructuring changes that have taken place within the inner workings of the capitalist mode of production for the last quarter century, their impact on the changing social character of the working class, and the potential for struggle will be examined in plenary and discussion sessions among Party members, friends and allies. Spanish translation will be provided at some sessions.

The conference is taking place at a critical moment. Throughout the U.S. progressive movement, more and more political activists and thinkers, young and old, are taking a serious interest in Marxist ideology and socialism as the only real solutions to all the ills fostered under class society.

Fred Goldstein, author of “Low-Wage Capitalism” and a WWP secretariat member, led a workshop at a major conference of the Union of Radical Political Economists, known as URPE, in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 24. Important political outreach for the WWP conference took place at this gathering. The following excerpted remarks were made by Goldstein at that workshop.

The condition of the working class in the world has been changed by two monumental developments in the last part of the 20th century–one political, the other economic.

The political changes were the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe, the opening-up of China to imperialist investment, the opening-up of India in 1991, and the opening more widely of formerly oppressed countries to the invasion of capital—countries which had been partially shielded from full-scale takeover of their economies by the existence of the Soviet Union.

The result of this political setback was that the world working class available to capitalist imperialism for super-exploitation doubled between the years 1985 and 2000 from 1.5 billion to 3 billion. This expansion took place in countries with historically low wages and massive unemployment.

The economic development that coincided with the political transformation was the leap forward in the scientific-technological revolution in the capitalist world. By that I mean the development of computerization, the Internet, satellite communications, fiber optic cable, vast computerized ports, containerization, super tankers with powerful turbine engines, jumbo jet transport, and so forth.

All this enabled the capitalist class in the imperialist countries to engineer a restructuring of the world economy that was as significant as the growth of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Low-Wage Capitalism” is not just a catchy phrase for the title of a book, but a description, a characterization, of the entire period of the last three decades brought about by these developments.

Wage competition and pauperization

What the ruling class did was to break up the production process into fine-tuned sub-processes and farm them out across the globe, seeking the cheapest labor in the enormously expanded pool of low-wage workers.

They set up a worldwide wage competition for workers in the imperialist countries on a job-for-job basis–so autoworkers in Detroit had to compete with autoworkers in Thailand. Service workers in Arizona had to compete with service workers in the Philippines. Computer programmers in New York had to compete with programmers in India, and so on.

The new world division created chains of production, global chains of exploitation, in which workers could be drawn into producing for the monopolies wherever they could be rounded up across the planet.

Wages are now being determined internationally based on the global low-wage workforce instead of nationally as they used to be. This was leading to the pauperization of the working class in the U.S. before the economic crisis hit.

The economic crisis has only deepened this. And capitalism has no way out. The new development in the U.S. capitalist system which began with the 1991 recession is the jobless recovery. It lasted 18 months in that recession. In the Clinton recession of 2000 to 2001 it took four years before employment reached pre-recession levels, and predictions for this crisis are anywhere from five to eight years.

But these predictions are not based on anything real. With the ruthless carrying-out of the technological destruction of jobs, speed-up, increasing productivity of labor, and the shrinking of the auto industry and the housing and construction industry—the two jobs engines of the economy—it will be impossible to put the 30 million workers already unemployed and underemployed back to work in any significant numbers.

Capitalism has entered a declining period of permanent crisis. The model established by the Republic Windows and Doors workers in Chicago, who occupied their plant to demand they be paid what was owed to them by Bank of America, is the model for the class struggle of the future, which is bound to come.

For more information about the WWP conference, including literature, registration and housing information, go to www.workersworld.net or call 212-627-2994.