In the fight to defeat lifestyle and wage inequality, we must understand how we got here by understanding the history of humans and how they have been controlled. First, it was just savagery, which lasted more than a million years. Then barbarism came along and lasted five thousand years. And then it was slaves where we belonged to the master for life, followed by the feudal serfdom or tenant, who were also likely bound for life to the lord and his land.
From there we went to capitalism, which is only 450 years old. In this time the industrial age was launched around the start of the 19th century, which brought large numbers of new wage slaves from the countryside to the cities and factories creating capitalist captains of industry and later masters of entire countries and their continents as their riches increased, riches that included wage slaves. Their riches also came from using our Commons to get ahead and using the wealth accumulated from our Commons and our labor swelled their riches and power to majestic proportions.
To understand how capitalists make their money off the backs of wage slaves, consider how most people go into the labor market through a personnel office or an employment agency, and the employer buys people’s labor at a prevailing wage whether by the hour, day, week or month. Then applies it under his supervision who is the Boss (the word boss was imported from the Dutch) to produce goods, which is sold at a profit. That profit is derived from the fact that wage slaves produce more valve then the capitalist pays for their labor.
If the bosses can keep labor low like the last 30 years, they get very rich and the workers are now with very little. If this is not revisited, we will see capitalism swept aside just like feudalism, which swept aside barbarism and savagery. How and by whom is this revolutionary transformation to be effected?
The wage slaves of the world are demanding a change in the inequality and if they don’t, capitalism could be relegated to the museum of antiquities. The workers will not stand for the exploitation and abuses any longer. Wages must be raised to $15 to $18 an hour, free education, universal healthcare, pensions and jobs for all who want to have one and the protection of unions.
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
Comments
Post a Comment