2010 Elections: The People Demand Jobs Protest of autoworkers, Michigan. PHOTO/DAYMON J. HARTLEY The 2010 general elections are over. As in 2008, the American voters once again voiced the economy as their number one issue of concern. They are afraid and want economic growth, with job-creating solutions. The party in power failed to provide these solutions. As a result, the Democrats took a trouncing nationally and also in statewide contests across the country. The American people voted the in’s - out and put the out’s - in, just as they had done in 2008 when Obama was elected president. But neither corporate political party can solve the ongoing structural and systemic economic crisis. Under a capitalist system of production and exchange, getting the economy growing requires a market. A market requires demand. Demand requires the ability to buy. The ability to buy requires income. Income requires a job. Today, a job requires being hired in an economy that is everyday replacing workers with new, highly automated, electronic technology. During the Great Depression of the industrial era it was possible to create temporary jobs programs when the human laborer didn’t have to compete with the laborless production of computers and robots. However, that electronic competition is a global reality today. Look at the direction of the global economy as a whole. Everywhere there are less jobs. How can a net increase in jobs be created when the global economy is increasingly producing more with less labor? Productivity growth today is based on increasing the application of computer and robotic methods of production. The result is less buying power. The American people are already producing more than they can purchase. We are seeing the beginning of the end of a wage-labor based system of buying and selling. Both corporate parties must grapple with this reality. However, they are strategically united to save the capitalist class and to protect private property at all costs. They just differ tactically on how to do it. The real issues facing the American people are never discussed. Those issues increasingly revolve around the fact that more people can not survive in this outmoded, labor-based economic system. It must be replaced with a system that is compatible with laborless production. Such a system must distribute the social product (food, clothing, housing, healthcare, education, etc.) on the basis of need and not on the ability to buy. At some point, new politics must and will emerge to allow such a debate to begin. When, is the question. New trends will start to reveal themselves. Subtle changes in people’s thinking about the problem in a new way will begin to take shape. In this context it’s interesting to note that an exit poll conducted and reported by CNN on November 2 said 62% of the voting public identified the troubled economy as the number one issue. Combine this with a poll conducted a month earlier by the Pew Research Center that found more voters now identify themselves as Independents at 37%, than as Democrats at 34%, or Republicans at 29%. Today the American people see the party in power as the problem. However, there is a growing awareness that both parties are incapable of solving the crisis. The next fundamental step is for some of this awareness to begin to consciously reject both parties and see the economic crisis as systemic, requiring new ideas, a new kind of thinking and a new political approach. Only then will the political terrain begin to sufficiently shift and create a new environment to engage in broader independent political discourse and the political struggle to create the new out of the old. _http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2010.11/PT.2010.11.03.shtml_ (http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2010.11/PT.2010.11.03.shtml)
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