Wed 11 Sep 2019, 07:34 AM | Posted by editor
LETTER from John Throne in Chicago.
Comrades, on a discussion list a comrade raised with me about the suicides and gun violence etc in the US and its causes. This was my response.
I’d just finished reading the New York Times. Timely. One article on the op-ed page is titled “the age of American despair”. It deals with deaths by suicide and alcohol over-dose. It calls these “deaths ion despair”.
It quotes from a report that there has been “a doubling of the deaths of despair from 22.7 per 100,000 in 2000 to 45.8 per 100,000 in 2017”. The article also says: “People are despairing because their jobs have been outsourced, their wages are stagnant, the rich have hi-jacked the economy”.
It also says that these “different self-destroying trends is a brute fact of American life” and concludes, “Despair as a sociological phenomenon is rarely permanent”. Some force, or forces, new forms of meaning eventually. And it matters not only that this happens, but which forces those will be”.
On the same page there is an article on drug addiction. It states: “Almost 20% of children are born already exposed to drugs”. And “Every seven minutes another American dies of an overdose.” It goes on to say that this means “sending executives of the big pharmaceutical companies” to prison along with other big drug dealers”.
I would add a few points. The NYT is trying to warn the capitalist class that some measures have to be taken or the extreme suffering that the system is imposing and things like climate change will provoke a huge opposition. But what you can see is how careful they are never to tie these problems to capitalism and also in this article that they understand that a movement will come but are not prepared to say, that is if they understand, that the working class can be this movement.
I am more and more convinced every day that we have to work together to link the daily catastrophes to capitalism. Using that word. And that we have to explain that the alternative is the collective power and collective brain of the international working class. Capitalism is the cause. The international working class the only solution.
*John Throne is a regular contributor to the US socialist blogsite, Facts for Working People, which can be found here.
