Exclusive apartments in downtown Manhattan sell for $57 million while in the streets nearby people sleep (and die) in doorways. The market for champagne, yachts and other luxury items is booming, while people go hungry and lose their homes. Food stamps are being cut in a country that produces enough food to feed the world. Why, in the richest country the world has ever known, with such abundance created around us, does a small class of billionaires have such a lion’s share of this social wealth, while the rest of us are pushed into joblessness, debt and insecurity?
According to one report, assets of the billionaires have doubled worldwide since 2009. In the US, 515 individuals own $2 trillion, while nearly half the population is below, on or just above the poverty line. The few members of the Walton family, the owners of Walmart, are worth more money than nearly half of the US population, yet their workers are paid so little that they are advised to apply for food stamps. Unemployment benefits have come to an end for millions, food stamps are slashed or taken away, and foreclosures and evictions continue and increase. Millions of lives are being destroyed and the streets are filling with homeless families. Austerity is imposed on the working class, while the owning class revels in luxury. During a recent cold snap seven people died in the streets of wealthy San Jose, CA – home to Google, Facebook and other giant Silicon Valley corporations, and also home to the largest homeless encampment in the country.
People are reacting to this with moral revulsion. Lives are being destroyed, along with the prospect of a better world for our children. Policies and laws are put into place to increase the wealth of the corporations and the capitalist class, while imposing austerity on the rest of us. The so-called economic ‘recovery’ is a shell game, another empty bubble inflated from a new round of debt, including student debt. The government is throwing trillions of dollars at the corporations through ‘quantitative easing’ and other means of guaranteeing the profits of Wall Street and the owning class.
Labor-replacing technology—computers and robots—is eliminating jobs forever. This has thrown capitalism, which is based on the buying and selling of labor power, into a terminal crisis. No capitalist can remain competitive paying for a person’s labor when it can be done cheaper by a robot. Politicians make empty promises of ‘jobs’ and ‘recovery,’ but can’t deliver because they are feeding at the corporate trough. The capitalist class enriches itself beyond all imagination, while workers are faced with austerity and hunger. The race is to the bottom.
There is no remedy for this under capitalism. People are waking up to the reality that they must unite in the interests of the majority to eliminate impoverishment and gross inequality. The only possible remedy is public ownership of the socially necessary means of production and the distribution of goods and services to all ‘according to need.’
