by the Editorial Board
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen of the Biden administration announced on May 18th that the US government would run out of money and be unable to pay its bills as soon as June 5th. The imperialist ruling class, via their representatives in the state, began to quibble about how to best shove the burden onto the poor and working class.
The US boasts the world’s largest public debt, and the threat of defaulting results in the deepening of the global economic crisis of imperialism around the world with severe consequence. Both major parties of the US imperialist ruling class agree on two things: first, that the debt ceiling must be raised to prolong their rampant speculation and preserve the all-mighty dollar as the world’s currency, and, second, that the burden must be pushed off onto the poor, working classes, and even onto the smaller capitalists. This means significant cuts affecting all sections of society below the big banking cartels of finance capital and excepting military spending. The ruling class has simply not yet reached an agreement on how to do this or who to hit the hardest.
For the past 22 years, the US government has spent more money than it makes. As the crises of overproduction deepened, the capitalists produced more machinery than workforce to work these machines, a glut of commodities followed, and profits tended to fall. Everything produced became gradually less and less profitable. The mishandling of the global Covid-19 Pandemic only added fuel to the smoldering fire, causing an explosive leap in the crisis.
The crisis could be seen by workers in 2021 manifesting as a hiring frenzy—the ruling class had more trucks than drivers, more offices than office workers, more warehouses than warehouse workers, and they called this “a worker shortage” in spite of the fact that more people were working than ever before.
Without the working people nothing moves, each item stuck in the chain loses its profitability, each machine or building out of use drains the profits from the enterprise. Inflation jumps as a result of the capitalist seeking profits, and the cost of all the necessary things like food and housing goes up, especially things that mean the basic survival and reproduction of the working people.
Since a certain number of workers are required to survive in order for capitalist production to continue, wages increase as a result of the rising prices of necessities. This fact is married to the dire need for workers to make use of all the overproduced means of production. However, the wage increases still trailed behind the cost of the essentials—what was more on paper actually has less purchasing power. The crisis of overproduction and the crisis of profitability continue to deepen.
The ruling class must knock wages down to secure profitability. They must overcome the working people who have banded together and have taken more strike action in 2023 than they did in 2022. As the cost of labor shrinks they call this a “cooling labor market.” What it really means is the destruction of the overproduced means of production, including the workforce.
This means the utilization of the debt crisis to force more and more workers out of work so that they can compete for lower wages at harder jobs with longer hours. The coming cuts that are necessary to raising the debt ceiling and avoiding insolvency serve just this purpose and represent the next stage in a crisis that is only getting worse.
There has been no stability since World War II and the US imperialists have stumbled from losing war after war, making trouble around the world to get punched in the nose by the Vietnamese, Iraqi, Afghani peoples, just to name a few. This has seen an increase in the militarization of the decomposing state and it has become unwieldy and unimaginably expensive.
The US has spend exorbitant amounts of money to loot the world and dominate it as the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower, all to shore up the interests of finance capital. With all of its desperate, vile and evil attempts to remain the king of the world, the beast has become exhausted and has seen its economy in permanent decline since the 1970s.
The political differences in the US imperialist ruling class only mask their social and economic agreements in their shared war on the working people—at home and especially abroad. Nevertheless, the political skirmishes are significant enough to cause real concern among their ranks. Whatever they do now has to keep the 2024 elections in mind. That is to say, this is not a great forecast for political agreement—disagreements could result in a government shut down as well as making insolvency a reality.
Imperialist-in-chief President Biden has hocked himself as the leader capable of reorganizing the crumbling infrastructure of the US—infrastructure needed for capitalist exploitation and circulation of its commodities. He has made alliances with sections of financial and industrial capital whose support depends on these projects, projects which require lots of government spending. Since all of these things have been foisted upon the masses as something that incidentally could benefit them, loss of spending on these projects could have major impact on his run for a second term. What is certain is both ruling class parties will seek to blame the other, with the Republican Party sure to cast the blame on the Biden presidency for the debt, even though the national debt has increased every year for at least ten years, a decade of both ruling class parties holding office.
This year and the last was a circus of the ruling class denial of recession, bending their own terms in a desperate effort to convince people that the crisis was not as severe as it is, even going so far as to laud the employment rate as a sign of stability and accomplishment. Now what looms is slashes on spending that benefit necessary social programs, public education, and welfare.
The impact of this will be high unemployment and the drastic increase in poverty among the people. Following from this, crime among the people will increase and the ruling class will use this to justify even more spending on militarizing and expanding the police departments and other reactionary armed forces. More and more necessary services will fall into the hands of private corporations who will sell the rights of the people at a premium.
Poverty accumulates in more and more hands while wealth accumulates in fewer and fewer hands; this is a basic law of the capitalist mode of production. All of this will ignite explosions of resistance among the masses, but only greater organization will give the masses the means to improve their fighting capacity. The working class has no other weapon than organization.
The mass movements and rebellions of the people have been quelled temporarily since the election of Biden in the farcical 2020 elections—the grassroots agents of the Democratic party, the NGOs and revisionists, have seen to it that the uprisings in the previous years under Obama and Trump administrations have not taken place again. This is especially evident in the decline of popular struggle against police terror. However, they cannot quell the just anger of the people forever and the coming electoral farce will be one of an increase in mass explosive energy. The problems the people face have not gone away; rather, they have only gotten worse and the people will begin again to rebel. It is certain that the regrouping of far right extremists has been taking place after the setbacks they faced since January 6th. They are preparing to use every means they can to brutalize the mass movement.
The only logical course for the working and oppressed people of the US and the world is the path of combat and resistance. There has never been, at least in the lifetime of most readers, a better time to prepare for this. Imperialism is a decomposing system, rotten and pestilent to its very core; it has fettered human production, stagnated culture, and ruined the very air we breathe. Fighting to destroy the imperialist system is necessary to all future human achievements. There is a world better than this one fighting tooth and nail to be born—take up your post in the fight by all means.
Note: Since the drafting of this article, the government has reached tentative agreements on raising the debt ceiling. These agreements come at the expense of the people—cutting social welfare programs, raising the age limit for workers on food stamps, and so on—and are generally part of the trend towards increased unemployment as the economic crisis develops.
