The Worker, Vol. 35, Number 9
Contents:
I. NATO's Militarist Course is Leading Mankind Towards a New World War
II. Unemployment and Capitalism
NATO's Militarist Course Is Leading Mankind Towards a New World War
From May 4 through the end of June, U.S. military forces are staging large-scale war "games" – Defender Europe 21 – in order to redouble the U.S. military posture, improve Europe-wide movement, readiness, and operational versatility alongside NATO and non-NATO partners.
Although the current exercises are cast as the largest in decades and as a part of recently mounting tensions between the U.S. and Russia, they are part of an escalation of U.S. militarization in Europe which took off 8-years ago with the launch of U.S. imperialism's "European Deterrence Initiative." With the launch of the initiative the Pentagon was authorized to turn around its direction by abandoning its earlier European disarmament doctrines.
In his Warsaw speech on the matter, President Obama summed up the scope of the U.S. posture of escalation as one involving not only flooding central and eastern Europe with new weapons systems, but also expansion of the field of NATO operations into out-of-area military "theaters". Of course, the precedent for out-of-area operations had already been set with NATO participation in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan just as the selling of post-Cold War NATO military build-up and expansion began during the Clinton administration.
According to Obama's June 4, 2014 speech, "Yesterday, I announced a new initiative to bolster the security of our NATO allies and increase America’s military presence in Europe. With the support of Congress, this will mean more pre-positioned equipment to respond quickly in a crisis, and exercises and training to keep our forces ready; additional U.S. forces – in the air, and sea, and on land, including here in Poland. And it will mean increased support to help friends like Ukraine, and Moldova and Georgia provide for their own defense.
"Just as the United States is increasing our commitment, so must others. Every NATO member is protected by our alliance, and every NATO member must carry its share in our alliance. This is the responsibility we have to each other.
"Finally, as free peoples, we join together, not simply to safeguard our own security but to advance the freedom of others. Today we affirm the principles for which we stand."
Thus, U.S. imperialism is militarizing Europe not in order to protect "peace and stability" but with the open aim of using NATO as a launching base in its pursuit of world hegemony. The alliance is directed, in the first place, against the workers and peoples of central and eastern Europe and their revolutionary struggles. Through NATO, U.S. imperialism's growing military presence will protect the investments and economic spheres of influence of U.S. and European imperialism by undermining the independence of the countries in central and eastern Europe.
In this year's May 3 announcement, spitting in the face of the European people, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby tried to define the issue of U.S.-led war games in Europe as a clear and above board act to be admired by all those who value international cooperation and transparency. According to Kirby, "Defender Europe is an exercise that's annual. We've been doing it for a long, long time. It's a defensive exercise. And it's one that helps us build interoperability. Here's the other thing that's different: we actually come to the podium and tell you about it...I'm going to continually talk about what we're doing – it's called transparency – it's a wonderful thing."
The Workers Party condemns the expansion of the NATO alliance which has always been and persists as an aggressive military alliance. Just as in the past it gave itself the immediate objective of the "containment of communism" to divide the people and cover up its aim of world conquest it does so today in the name of "counter-terrorism," "freedom," and "democracy." We can expect only more of the same from the twin parties of war. Moreover, NATO's very existence is antagonistic to the interests of everyone who holds humanity dear. It places before us the inescapable and urgent necessity for the working class and people to assert ourselves. NATO is leading humanity down the road towards a third world war. Only the independent movement and struggle of the workers and people can stay the hand of the imperialist war-makers and defeat them.
Although the current exercises are cast as the largest in decades and as a part of recently mounting tensions between the U.S. and Russia, they are part of an escalation of U.S. militarization in Europe which took off 8-years ago with the launch of U.S. imperialism's "European Deterrence Initiative." With the launch of the initiative the Pentagon was authorized to turn around its direction by abandoning its earlier European disarmament doctrines.
In his Warsaw speech on the matter, President Obama summed up the scope of the U.S. posture of escalation as one involving not only flooding central and eastern Europe with new weapons systems, but also expansion of the field of NATO operations into out-of-area military "theaters". Of course, the precedent for out-of-area operations had already been set with NATO participation in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan just as the selling of post-Cold War NATO military build-up and expansion began during the Clinton administration.
According to Obama's June 4, 2014 speech, "Yesterday, I announced a new initiative to bolster the security of our NATO allies and increase America’s military presence in Europe. With the support of Congress, this will mean more pre-positioned equipment to respond quickly in a crisis, and exercises and training to keep our forces ready; additional U.S. forces – in the air, and sea, and on land, including here in Poland. And it will mean increased support to help friends like Ukraine, and Moldova and Georgia provide for their own defense.
"Just as the United States is increasing our commitment, so must others. Every NATO member is protected by our alliance, and every NATO member must carry its share in our alliance. This is the responsibility we have to each other.
"Finally, as free peoples, we join together, not simply to safeguard our own security but to advance the freedom of others. Today we affirm the principles for which we stand."
Thus, U.S. imperialism is militarizing Europe not in order to protect "peace and stability" but with the open aim of using NATO as a launching base in its pursuit of world hegemony. The alliance is directed, in the first place, against the workers and peoples of central and eastern Europe and their revolutionary struggles. Through NATO, U.S. imperialism's growing military presence will protect the investments and economic spheres of influence of U.S. and European imperialism by undermining the independence of the countries in central and eastern Europe.
In this year's May 3 announcement, spitting in the face of the European people, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby tried to define the issue of U.S.-led war games in Europe as a clear and above board act to be admired by all those who value international cooperation and transparency. According to Kirby, "Defender Europe is an exercise that's annual. We've been doing it for a long, long time. It's a defensive exercise. And it's one that helps us build interoperability. Here's the other thing that's different: we actually come to the podium and tell you about it...I'm going to continually talk about what we're doing – it's called transparency – it's a wonderful thing."
The Workers Party condemns the expansion of the NATO alliance which has always been and persists as an aggressive military alliance. Just as in the past it gave itself the immediate objective of the "containment of communism" to divide the people and cover up its aim of world conquest it does so today in the name of "counter-terrorism," "freedom," and "democracy." We can expect only more of the same from the twin parties of war. Moreover, NATO's very existence is antagonistic to the interests of everyone who holds humanity dear. It places before us the inescapable and urgent necessity for the working class and people to assert ourselves. NATO is leading humanity down the road towards a third world war. Only the independent movement and struggle of the workers and people can stay the hand of the imperialist war-makers and defeat them.
Unemployment and Capitalism
The following article is the fourth in a series of reference articles which began with the Volume 35 # 6 issue of The Worker.
The capitalists endeavor to reduce the number of workers employed in order to increase competition amongst the workers and drive down the wages of the entire class. At the same time, with the help of their lieutenants, the trade union bureaucrats, the capitalists try to turn workers against each other by claiming Chinese workers, or women workers, or young workers, or immigrant workers are "taking your job." But the workers must place the blame for unemployment where it belongs – on the shoulders of the capitalist moneybags, who are throwing the workers into the street to increase their profits and intensify the exploitation of the employed workers. The working class must rely on the unity of the employed and unemployed, on the unity of the workers of all its different sections, and develop a vigorous fight to force the capitalists to dip into their enormous profits and to provide jobs or a livelihood for all.
Workers, who have labored for their living and in the process created the material wealth do not suddenly become "lazy" and quit their jobs. Rather they are laid off by the capitalists owners. Workers squeezed out of production constitute the industrial reserve army of the unemployed.
People want to work but capitalist society is in no position to provide them with jobs. Furthermore, the capitalists are not interested in abolishing the industrial reserve army. What are the reasons for this? Karl Marx analyzed the causes of unemployment and found that the demand for labor power is determined not by the whole of the capital earmarked for purchasing machinery, equipment, buildings and labor power, but rather by that part of the capital which is used for acquiring labor power.
Outwardly, there is no link between unemployment and the capitalist form of labor. Bourgeois economists attribute both the excesses and shortages of labor force to population growth. In actual fact, however, unemployment is determined not by the population growth rate but by the capitalist demand for labor power. The causes of unemployment are objectively associated with the peculiarities of labor under capitalism rather than with the laws of mother nature.
Unemployment is inherent in capitalism because, under capitalism, the means of production (society's tools, which have been accumulated over generations as a result of the labor of the workers themselves) are monopolized by a tiny class of exploiters. This is one side of the economic relations of capitalism. The other side is that the workers – the laboring class whose muscles and brains produce all the material blessings – are disenfranchised, separated from the implements of labor, the tools of society; the worker thus has no way to secure a livelihood or engage in social production except by selling his labor-power, day in and day out, to the capitalist owners. But even though the worker needs a job in order to live and even though he has the ability and inclination to lead a productive life, this is not enough – he must first find a capitalist owner who will employ him.
As capitalism develops, an increasing proportion of the accumulated capital is invested in technical innovation and the production of new kinds of equipment, stock, fuel and materials, and not in the efforts to create new jobs. This means that with the development of capitalism an increasing percentage of capital is spent on innovating the means of labor, and accordingly, a reduced share is used for the purposes of satisfying the demand for workers. Thus, what causes compulsory unemployment is not technical progress as such, but the capitalist forms of utilizing it.
The capitalists take advantage of unemployment to impose extreme overwork on the remaining workforce through such methods as speed-up and understaffing. As in bourgeois society they are not guaranteed the right to work and may lose their jobs at any time, the fear of dismissal and finding oneself in the ranks of the unemployed pressures the wage workers to labor more intensively.
There are three main types of unemployment: casual, concealed and long-term.
Casual unemployment implies the loss of work for a comparatively short period. The causes of this form of unemployment are many and varied, the most important of them being the fact that capital accumulation at individual enterprises and within individual industries in different periods is uneven. Casual unemployment involves workers who lose their jobs because of the introduction of new machinery or the curtailment of production during the economic slump. In the older industries, the curtailment of production entails reductions in the number of jobs and creates a demand for labor power in newly-commissioned enterprises. In the process some workers are ousted temporarily from the sphere of relations of labor while others become involved in such relations, and still others end up experiencing long-term unemployment.
Concealed unemployment involves workers who, while formally still regarded as independent small-property owners, are actually on the verge of being transformed into proletarians. Most of those hit by it are farmers and artisans crushed by competition. However due to the pre-existing cyclical ups and downs of the economy and the growth of a permanent army of the unemployed, industry is in no position to absorb them. Nonetheless, registered as small-property owners, they are not regarded as unemployed. Thus, as long as they remain small-property owners they are compelled to try to stay in an impossible situation, to try to drag out a miserable existence.
Long-term unemployment designates the numbers of the unemployed who must rely for long-term support on the income of other workers in order to survive. Nowadays more of those who form part of the working class are involuntarily unemployed during the “good times” than were formerly unemployed during the “bad times;” at the end of each cycle more and more workers find themselves without any hope of recovering their former position. Long-term unemployment describes the experience not only of those who have been completely pushed out of productive life over a long period, but also the experience of those numerous categories of semi-employed workers who are not always entirely without wages, but whose intermittent casual earnings come from doing temporary, contingent work.
The capitalists endeavor to reduce the number of workers employed in order to increase competition amongst the workers and drive down the wages of the entire class. At the same time, with the help of their lieutenants, the trade union bureaucrats, the capitalists try to turn workers against each other by claiming Chinese workers, or women workers, or young workers, or immigrant workers are "taking your job." But the workers must place the blame for unemployment where it belongs – on the shoulders of the capitalist moneybags, who are throwing the workers into the street to increase their profits and intensify the exploitation of the employed workers. The working class must rely on the unity of the employed and unemployed, on the unity of the workers of all its different sections, and develop a vigorous fight to force the capitalists to dip into their enormous profits and to provide jobs or a livelihood for all.
Workers, who have labored for their living and in the process created the material wealth do not suddenly become "lazy" and quit their jobs. Rather they are laid off by the capitalists owners. Workers squeezed out of production constitute the industrial reserve army of the unemployed.
People want to work but capitalist society is in no position to provide them with jobs. Furthermore, the capitalists are not interested in abolishing the industrial reserve army. What are the reasons for this? Karl Marx analyzed the causes of unemployment and found that the demand for labor power is determined not by the whole of the capital earmarked for purchasing machinery, equipment, buildings and labor power, but rather by that part of the capital which is used for acquiring labor power.
Outwardly, there is no link between unemployment and the capitalist form of labor. Bourgeois economists attribute both the excesses and shortages of labor force to population growth. In actual fact, however, unemployment is determined not by the population growth rate but by the capitalist demand for labor power. The causes of unemployment are objectively associated with the peculiarities of labor under capitalism rather than with the laws of mother nature.
Unemployment is inherent in capitalism because, under capitalism, the means of production (society's tools, which have been accumulated over generations as a result of the labor of the workers themselves) are monopolized by a tiny class of exploiters. This is one side of the economic relations of capitalism. The other side is that the workers – the laboring class whose muscles and brains produce all the material blessings – are disenfranchised, separated from the implements of labor, the tools of society; the worker thus has no way to secure a livelihood or engage in social production except by selling his labor-power, day in and day out, to the capitalist owners. But even though the worker needs a job in order to live and even though he has the ability and inclination to lead a productive life, this is not enough – he must first find a capitalist owner who will employ him.
As capitalism develops, an increasing proportion of the accumulated capital is invested in technical innovation and the production of new kinds of equipment, stock, fuel and materials, and not in the efforts to create new jobs. This means that with the development of capitalism an increasing percentage of capital is spent on innovating the means of labor, and accordingly, a reduced share is used for the purposes of satisfying the demand for workers. Thus, what causes compulsory unemployment is not technical progress as such, but the capitalist forms of utilizing it.
The capitalists take advantage of unemployment to impose extreme overwork on the remaining workforce through such methods as speed-up and understaffing. As in bourgeois society they are not guaranteed the right to work and may lose their jobs at any time, the fear of dismissal and finding oneself in the ranks of the unemployed pressures the wage workers to labor more intensively.
There are three main types of unemployment: casual, concealed and long-term.
Casual unemployment implies the loss of work for a comparatively short period. The causes of this form of unemployment are many and varied, the most important of them being the fact that capital accumulation at individual enterprises and within individual industries in different periods is uneven. Casual unemployment involves workers who lose their jobs because of the introduction of new machinery or the curtailment of production during the economic slump. In the older industries, the curtailment of production entails reductions in the number of jobs and creates a demand for labor power in newly-commissioned enterprises. In the process some workers are ousted temporarily from the sphere of relations of labor while others become involved in such relations, and still others end up experiencing long-term unemployment.
Concealed unemployment involves workers who, while formally still regarded as independent small-property owners, are actually on the verge of being transformed into proletarians. Most of those hit by it are farmers and artisans crushed by competition. However due to the pre-existing cyclical ups and downs of the economy and the growth of a permanent army of the unemployed, industry is in no position to absorb them. Nonetheless, registered as small-property owners, they are not regarded as unemployed. Thus, as long as they remain small-property owners they are compelled to try to stay in an impossible situation, to try to drag out a miserable existence.
Long-term unemployment designates the numbers of the unemployed who must rely for long-term support on the income of other workers in order to survive. Nowadays more of those who form part of the working class are involuntarily unemployed during the “good times” than were formerly unemployed during the “bad times;” at the end of each cycle more and more workers find themselves without any hope of recovering their former position. Long-term unemployment describes the experience not only of those who have been completely pushed out of productive life over a long period, but also the experience of those numerous categories of semi-employed workers who are not always entirely without wages, but whose intermittent casual earnings come from doing temporary, contingent work.