On the eve of the elections, millions of American workers face an increasingly dire situation. With over eight million cases and more than 220,000 dead from the coronavirus, a second wave is upon us. As many as 400,000 could die by the first of the year. And the knowledge that we are not alone brings little comfort. With over forty million cases and over a million dead globally, the virus is surging everywhere. Inexorably linked to the growing pandemic is a growing economic depression, painfully expressed in the U.S. by the increasingly desperate predicament for millions of workers.
More than six million failed to make their rental or mortgage payments in September. Twenty-six million student loan borrowers missed their student loan payment, forty percent of all student loan borrowers. Millions of unemployed American workers faced an income “cliff” in July when the $600 in weekly pandemic jobless benefits ended. Now all unemployment options are being exhausted at both the state and federal levels.
Alex Emanuel, an unemployed actor in New York City, says he is now “making absolute zero.” Michelle Evermore of the National Unemployment Law Project says, “You will see the pain spread further and further into the economy. When people lose even the base benefit, people are going to become desperate.”
Globally, over fifty million people have lost their jobs. Sixty million are being pushed into extreme poverty. Two hundred sixty-five million are pushed to the brink of starvation.
There is every indication that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old student activist and environmentalist from Sweden who became a leader in a global movement to save the planet from environmental disaster, described the crisis of climate change as an “existential threat” to the future of the planet. The depths of the crisis also mean that the American workers who are being discarded and cast into destitution are facing an existential threat to their very lives. Out of desperation itself, growing millions of workers are arising in a fight for the basic needs of life: food, water, shelter, health care, education. The fight for basic needs is a fight for survival and for the right to a prosperous, peaceful, and secure life.
The new class of workers is a rising social force created by the new, automated technology that is eliminating millions of jobs. More than a movement of the poor, they are responding to the dire circumstances being accelerated in this current crisis.
At this time, more than any other, the question of which way forward is most urgent. The government and the class that rules it have made it clear that they have no solutions and have no regard for an impoverished class they see as worthless. This is why the movement of the new class of discarded and impoverished workers has necessarily entered into the electoral arena on all levels, from local to state elections to the national elections. Not only are they demanding answers and that their basic needs be met, they see government as being a big part of the problem. The government is standing in the way, and it must be confronted.
There is no question that Donald Trump is a part of the problem. Getting him out of office is important. But Trump is himself a representative of a class, a ruling class, in which the corporations have merged with government to resolve the crisis on their own terms and in their own interests.
These are revolutionary times, and they call for revolutionary solutions. To secure the basic necessities of life, our class must necessarily obtain the political power to construct a new kind of society in which the wealth of society is distributed equally and to all in need. This is the way forward. Knowing that such a new world is possible is what gives us hope.
Published: November 2, 2020
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