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DETROIT, MI —Time.com published an opinion post by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar entitled “The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race.” It says, “Unless we want the Ferguson atrocity to also be swallowed and become nothing more than an intestinal irritant to history, we have to address the situation not just as another act of systemic racism, but as what else it is: class warfare.”
The Huffington Post published a post by Lawrence J. Hanley, who is International President, Amalgamated Transit Union in D.C., Member of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council, entitled, “The Hidden Violence” which added, “As Abdul-Jabbar said in Time,” “ Rather than uniting to face the real foe—do-nothing politicians, legislators, and others in power—we fall into the trap of turning against each other, expending our energy battling our allies instead of our enemies.”
Both authors have identified what is at stake today, and consequently the class content of the struggle in this country.
This class content of the struggle is global. Underlying Ferguson is the qualitative change in how things are now produced, not just here but worldwide. Since the “microprocessor” was applied to production, starting in the early 1980s, we still talk about more jobs, but in fact, jobs are lost permanently as human labor is eliminated in the workplace. In addition, 44% of the people working in this country today are paid the minimum wage. So if the solution is more jobs, they will be more minimum wage jobs. The solution is producing for everyone’s human needs instead of producing for the profit needs of a few billionaires.
In this respect, Mr. Abdul-Jabbar raises another key point: He says, “The U.S. Census Report finds that 50 million Americans are poor. Fifty million voters is a powerful block if they ever organized in an effort to pursue their common economic goals. So, it’s crucial that those in the wealthiest One percent keep the poor fractured . . .”
The road to class unity is the struggle for our basic needs. The fight for food, shelter, running water, education, healthcare, immigration rights, etc., are all part of the struggle for the future of all of us. Currently, who gets the necessities of life is based on who owns the means of life, not on who needs them. Society must own the giant productive processes, the robots and the computers, and distribute the world of plenty to all based on need.
What we lack is the independent political movement to make the transition to the future that the microprocessor requires. Will that future benefit all human beings or will it be another class system that will benefit the few?
