A first step in ending "crisis-ridden dictatorship of capital"

For a federal public works program
http://www.themilitant.com/2011/7530/753020.html

A federally funded public works program to create millions of jobs is needed immediately. That stark reality—one many working people have known and lived for years—is underlined by the latest government unemployment figures. The U.S. Labor Department reports that in July only 58.1 percent of the working-age population had jobs, down from a year ago.

The “stimulus” plans of the bipartisan Congress and current Democratic White House and its Republican forerunner have done nothing to put jobless workers back to work. But Washington could launch an emergency public works program to create productive jobs repairing roads and bridges, expanding railroads and public transport, building affordable housing, and constructing schools and other infrastructure needed by working people.

This should be the immediate demand of class-conscious workers today, not a “Shorter workweek with no cut in pay,” the front-page headline on the Militant’s August 1 issue. It took the massive, working-class-led social movement that forged the industrial unions in the 1930s to win the 40-hour workweek, codified in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act adopted by Congress and signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938. (The brutality under capitalism of tens of millions forced to toil far more or fewer than 40 hours against their will is another matter.)

It will take working-class battles on that scale or greater to force the U.S. rulers to concede a shorter workweek with no cut in pay. Such a measure would slash deeply into their profit rate.

Another Militant article, in the August 8 issue, quotes Chris Hoeppner, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Congress in New York’s 9th District, as saying funds for such a jobs program “would come out of the bosses’ profits, which they take from the wealth working people produce with our labor.”

This inadvertently gives the tip of a finger to the capitalists’ mystification that a federal jobs program is an enormous cost to social wealth, one that—whether pro or con—reinforces “big government.” The truth, as SWP candidates explain, is that putting millions back to work would create value on a massive scale.

By doing so, the surplus wealth workers, farmers, and other toilers create with our social labor can be used to reverse capitalism’s inevitable rotting out of infrastructure needed by the vast working majority.

Fighting for such a program would undercut the bosses’ efforts to get working people to compete with each other for scarce jobs. It would strengthen the unity of our class for coming battles.

It would advance building the kind of revolutionary working-class movement that can fight for workers power, opening the road to battles to end, once and for all, the exploitation, oppression, and wars spawned by the crisis-ridden dictatorship of capital.

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