Date: Mon, 11 Apr 1994 22:04:18 -0700 From: James I Davis To: jdav@netcom.com Subject: Rally Comrades (new online pubs) [This is the first electronic edition of RALLY, COMRADES! It is being sent to you as a subscriber to the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE (Online Edition). It's intent is to assess the current political and economic conditions, and map out the tasks of revolutionaries at this stage of the struggle. It is published monthly. If you would like to continue receiving RC, send e-mail to jdav@igc.org.] ****************************************************************** ****************************************************************** ##### #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ##### ###### ## ## #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### #### ## ## # |||| |||| || || ||||| |||| ||||| |||||| |||| ## || || || || ||| ||| || || || || || || || || | ## || || || || | || ||||| |||||| || || ||||| || ## || || || || || || || || || || || || || | || |||| |||| || || || || || || ||||| |||||| |||| ## ****************************************************************** April, 1994 Electronic Edition Vol. 13, No. 2 ------------------------------------------------------------------ INDEX TO Volume 13, Number 2 1. VOUCHERS AIM TO DESTROY OUR RIGHT TO AN EDUCATION 2. ALABAMA: FIGHT FOR EQUAL AND QUALITY EDUCATION LINKED TO TAX REFORM 3. SPREADING ECONOMIC CRISIS SETS THE STAGE FOR NEW UPRISINGS (Report from the Political Committee of the NOC) 4. GETTING TO THE SOURCE: WHERE HAVE THE JOBS GONE? (regular column) ****************************************************************** 1. VOUCHERS AIM TO DESTROY OUR RIGHT TO AN EDUCATION ****************************************************************** By Steven Miller In November 1993, California voters overwhelmingly defeated a voucher initiative. If the measure had passed, parents would have been given a voucher for part of the cost of their children's education to be used at either public or private schools. This initiative was the first large, statewide effort to eliminate public education. It won't be the last. In the guise of giving parents "choice" and "better access to good schools," voucher programs would divert money from public schools to private ones. This would gut the already meager funding for schools and kill public education. Vouchers are part of a complete overhaul of national education policy being organized by the capitalist class to match the electronic age. The so-called "voucher movement" is organized nationally from the top down by hit men like former U.S. Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, Sen. Robert Dole (R.-Kansas) and two former secretaries of education in the Reagan Cabinet, Lamar Alexander and William Bennett. These men sent their own children to expensive private schools. Now they claim to have all the answers to the problems of public education! Voucher proponents exploit the genuine dissatisfaction which working class families have with the public schools. For most families, public education is the only chance their children will ever have to prepare for a job and thus avoid homelessness. Today, electronic technology no longer requires a work force on the scale of the industrial era. Economists predict that electronic labor-replacing technology will take the jobs of up to 25 million workers in the 1990s. The daily press is full of calls for reorganizing a "leaner, meaner government." These policies translate into a war on the poor. This is the social context for the privatization of education. Why should capitalists pay to educate people they won't ever be able to exploit? The United States was the first country to establish free public education. It is now becoming the first to dismantle it. Education is restructured every time a leap in technology transforms the labor market. The very nature of the tools requires education to train workers to use them productively. David Kearns, a former chief executive officer of Xerox and a major spokesman for education reform, described the changes this way: "At the end of World War II, a Navy cruiser had 1,700 men on it. The average educational level to run the ship was perhaps eighth grade. Today, a cruiser has 700 men and women on it, and the average educational level is about two years beyond high school. That's American business. It's exactly the same." Kearns doesn't mention what happened to the 1,000 people who got laid off! With electronics, the work force under capitalism polarizes into two groups -- a small elite of highly trained technicians who design and repair the machinery and the great mass of workers who don't even have to know how to read or add. The electronic market thus requires two separate and vastly unequal educational systems. One is for the "talented tenth" -- the few elite students who will become the engineers of the 21st century. The other acts as a warehouse for the millions of children who are becoming marginalized and will never work. This second system already exists in the central cities. It just needs to be separated from the first. The voucher scheme emerged in this context. Just months after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing "separate but equal" schools, Milton Friedman, an extreme right-wing economist, proposed that every family be given a voucher to cover the cost of a child's education. Families could choose any school, public or private, as long as it met rudimentary conditions set by the government. (Friedman compared these conditions to the sanitary inspection of a restaurant.) The first "choice" programs were instituted in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where schools were closed for five years. School boards gave white families vouchers to attend private, segregated academies. In other parts of the South, "freedom of choice" programs meant that African American families were simply given a voucher and told to go ahead and integrate a school. These public school "choice" programs were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1968. In recent years, school funding has been shifting from local communities to the state level. Most urban school districts are polarizing into a few elite schools on one side and the great majority of schools, which amount to little more than holding pens for young people, on the other. The mostly rich, mainly white suburbs are not about to tax themselves to subsidize schools in the cities, increasingly made up of students who are poor, black and brown. Vouchers would be a way to subsidize individual schools while banning efforts to equalize the schools. Voucher advocates argue that schools are unresponsive to parents and cannot change, that parents need a "choice." They don't mention that public schools have been underfunded for decades. They claim that by creating a "market" for education, vouchers would allow competition to determine which schools will succeed and fail. They don't usually mention that, under market conditions, enterprises which fail are closed. The idea that competition will create a nation of small, effective schools is a myth. Under capitalism, the market is an unregulated mechanism which concentrates money, resources and power into the hands of a few. The few voucher or school "choice" programs that have already been put into effect take control away from parents. A school that provides top-quality education will be overwhelmed with applicants, receiving far more than it can accept. These schools then have the choice of selecting the students they want, using examinations, credit checks, and past records to hand-pick students best suited to help achieve the school's goals. Since making a profit is paramount, these schools tend to drop slow learners, students who come late or the ones with "bad attitudes." Most of the California schools that would have accepted vouchers already demand that students have grade-level skills before applying. A voucher program would mean transferring money and resources to wealthier schools, draining money from poorer schools. Voucher programs do not provide anywhere near the cost of high-quality private schools, where tuition usually averages more than $10,000. But in the market, you get what you pay for. Let the buyer beware! Vouchers will not help neighborhood schools; they will end them. Since vouchers would privatize education and eliminate public controls, they would legalize virtually all forms of discrimination, including religious and racial discrimination. Private schools can teach whatever they want. The creation of an education market will have very immediate benefits for the capitalists. They can finance suburban education with very little change, while separating the urban school districts. Affluent parents can rid themselves of the tax burdens of educating other people's children as well as the costs of school safety and legal safeguards. The budgets of central city educational systems run into hundreds of millions of dollars. Vouchers would open school budgets and local governments to unregulated looting by private corporations on a scale only dreamed of by the junk bond kings. The electronic labor market under capitalism only requires schools for about 10 percent of the children -- and that's about all that will be financed. The capitalists are blaming public schools for the social problems they themselves have created. Now they call on us to give up the right to an equal, quality public education and public ownership of the schools in exchange for another quick-fix scheme. If public education is a right, then the government must be compelled to recognize and finance it. The existing system of education under capitalism deserves to be indicted and condemned. Let's change the system in order to guarantee our rights, not end them. Any attempt to improve the situation in the schools must be part of an overall program to guarantee jobs, decent health care and adequate and affordable housing and to oppose the criminalization of the youth. Right in step with vouchers come new schemes to use ever more blatant forms of police control against young people. In the 21st century, education will mean the ability to work with abstractions, develop system thinking, experiment and collaborate in production teams. The industrial system of public education has outlived its time. Public education cannot go back to that. Electronics will force changes in any system of education, whether public or private. The question is which children will be educated and who will make the decisions. Post-industrial education offers the chance for our peoples to develop the enthusiastic love for learning and cooperation that every child brings to the first day of kindergarten. The fight is on. The fight for equal, quality education for all children is part of the fight of our class to survive. [Steven Miller is a teacher in a public high school and co-chair of the NOC Public Education Committee.] ****************************************************************** 2. ALABAMA: FIGHT FOR EQUAL AND QUALITY EDUCATION LINKED TO TAX REFORM ****************************************************************** By Tonny Algood On March 31, 1993, Alabama Circuit Judge Eugene Reese ruled that the method of funding public education in the state was not only inequitable but inadequate. He ruled that this was in violation of the state's constitution, which provides for an adequate public education for all children in Alabama. This historic ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by several poor school districts (the Alabama Coalition for Equity), the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, and a group representing disabled students. During the hearing, the disparities between poor and wealthy districts were exposed. For example, one North Alabama school system spends $1,800 per student annually, while a wealthy Jefferson County school district spends $5,100 per pupil. It was also pointed out that there were entire school systems in the state where the highest math taught in high school was first- year algebra. One school had no microscopes for science class; the teacher showed students a photograph of a microscope! Many schools are faced with a loss of accreditation due to overcrowded classrooms, inadequate textbooks, too few library books, etc. Judge Reese set a September 1994 deadline for the Alabama Legislature to provide adequate and equitable funding for public schools. If the Legislature fails to act, the courts will intervene as they had to do in 1955 when school desegregation was ordered. Judge Reese's ruling has given some strength to groups who have fought for quality public education for all children in Alabama. In many ways, the struggle taking place around public education in Alabama is a reflection of what is happening throughout the country. It comes at a time when society is restructuring around the technology used for production. Society is becoming polarized along class lines. As the number of high-paying jobs decreases due to the increased use of computers and robots in production, the tax base also decreases. Those services, such as public education, that depend on taxes for funding find themselves with less and less funds to operate. In Alabama, schools are funded by property taxes. Local districts can vote to increase property taxes to fund local schools above the level provided by the state. Wealthier districts, such as the one in Jefferson County, have been able to fund their schools at a higher level. Alabama is known to have one of the most regressive tax systems in the country. Sales taxes that hit poor people hardest are high, while property taxes are low. This is due to the fact that, historically, the plantation owners, and today the big timber companies have led the fight to keep property taxes low. It is hard to convince people who are paying nine to 10 percent sales taxes to vote to increase property taxes. Those with the least ties to production are seen as expendable when it comes to their need for education, housing, health care and food. Our economic system is not set up to provide these services for that growing section of the population no longer needed for production. After World War II, when industries wanted to relocate to or expand in the South to take advantage of a non-union labor force being displaced by the mechanization of farming, public education in Alabama improved. Schools were desegregated; vocational training schools and union colleges flourished. Today, public schools in Alabama are more racially integrated than public schools in Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and California. However, industry no longer requires the large numbers of educated workers that were required for production 20 or 30 years ago. It needs a smaller number of workers, but with higher skills than the public schools in Alabama are able to provide. This is why we are seeing two different positions come forward to fight for education reform. One group is led predominantly by business interests. They do not want to see public schools fail completely, but they also do not want to see their taxes increase to provide adequate and equitable funding for all students in public schools. On the other side is a growing movement led by the Coalition of Alabamians to Reform Education (CARE), which is made up of organizations like the Alabama New South Coalition, Alabama Arise and the Twenty-First Century Youth Project. They are not only leading the fight for an equal, quality education for every student in Alabama public schools, but are also demanding that this be done by taxing the propertied interests to pay for the needed reforms. When the Alabama Senate recently passed an education reform bill in response to Judge Reese's ruling, it was this coalition that fought for the passage of 12 amendments to protect the interests of poor children. However, the bill, which passed the Senate 33-3, carries with it a $1 billion price tag, with no adequate means of funding. Education reform has passed the Legislature before, but died later due to lack of funding. And this being an election year, the Legislature will not vote for tax reform to fund education. However, this same legislature last year voted to pass what has become known as the "Mercedes Bill." This law will help to finance new or expanding industries through tax breaks. It allows companies to forego paying state income taxes for up to 25 years and instead use the money to pay off existing debts. It also makes it easier to exempt companies from paying property taxes. In 1993, Mobile County already had $1.5 billion in business property exempt from taxes. In addition to the exemptions given Mercedes Benz to locate in Alabama, other companies will be allowed the same exemptions. This bill allows companies to insure their profits during restructuring around the new technology at the expense of workers who must make up the difference or go without needed services that these taxes would otherwise be used to fund. To add insult to injury, the Mercedes law will allow companies to take up to five percent of what would be an employee's state income tax withholding to use to pay off the company's debt! The next fight around education reform in Alabama will again be around tax reform. During the Civil Rights Commemorative March in Selma this year, the theme was "The Ballot and the Book, Vote Our Children." The struggle in Alabama is becoming one for the future of our children. The struggle to force the companies and large land-owners to pay for education reform and other needed services must be supported. Those people wanting to participate in this movement should join those forces that are on the front line in this battle. [Tonny Algood is the former president of Local 18 of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America. He is a member of the Alabama New South Coalition and on the National Council of the NOC.] ****************************************************************** 3. SPREADING ECONOMIC CRISIS SETS THE STAGE FOR NEW UPRISINGS Report from the Political Committee of the NOC ****************************************************************** Comrades, a year of struggles and growth has passed since the formation of our National Organizing Committee. A year in the life of an organization is not a long time. During this time, we have accumulated a considerable amount of experience. If we are to consolidate our work and keep on course, it is necessary to sum up this experience in order to evaluate the growing new relationship of class forces. Our tactical approach is to rely on and exacerbate the spontaneous movement as the basis for building and consolidating the NOC. This tactic arises from the theoretical conclusion that for the first time, the spontaneous movement is the revolutionary (not the insurrectionary) movement. Our theoretical conclusion is that building the revolutionary movement concretely means building the spontaneous movement. Why is this so? Because this spontaneous movement, different from all such movements in history, does not have a choice of political directions. This spontaneous movement is an objective communist movement. Its goals, reflecting the development of the means of production, are for the distribution of the material and cultural wealth of society according to need. Therefore, for the first time in history, this spontaneous movement is the foundation upon which the subjective, insurrectionary, or communist political movement must stand. The dialectical unity of the subjective and objective movement is the key to the revolution. This concept is radically new in revolutionary theory and must be studied and thoroughly mastered if the tactics flowing from it are to be correctly applied. Our fundamental tactic has been to guide the objective process through its current stage of development. This calls for a clear understanding of the line of march. These are two different but interconnected processes. One, the stage of development, is just that. For example, the first stage of the revolution is the political awakening of the class. This stage is indispensable and if it is not gone through, the process dies. The line of march is the route of getting through this stage. For example, the first position to be won along that route is the formation of an organization of revolutionaries and the creation of a press that has the goal of politically shaking up the class. The second major step along the line of march -- and this is what we are grappling with now -- is learning to utilize the organization of revolutionaries and the press to accomplish the goal of "shaking up the proletariat." What is the situation now? The qualitative changes in the productive forces are accelerating. This brings about ever greater polarization of wealth and poverty. On the one hand, wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. On the other hand, poverty is spreading out to formerly secure sections of society. The Chicago Tribune of Sept. 27, 1993 stated: "The Census Bureau's release of last year's official income and poverty statistics Thursday yielded a grim portrait of young and middle-aged families losing ground to economic stagnation in every region of the country, especially in the Northeast and West." The combination of the shrinking of the market and the greater efficiency of the means of production has created an unheard-of competition between individual capitalists, monopolies, cartels, nations and trading blocs. The evolving concept of "re- engineering" is a reflection of this development. It is forcing whole new sectors of the working class into a position where they have to -- sooner or later, have to -- make a social response to these changes. We were correct in describing the Los Angeles uprising as the response of the displaced unskilled and semi-skilled workers to being forced into permanent unemployment. There was a time lag of several years between the actual permanent layoffs and the social response. During that period and the period since then, layoffs have continued and ever wider sectors of the class have been affected. Society today is more restless than ever. We cannot predict exactly when, but inevitably there will be uprisings taking place within sectors of society that formerly were the basis of the country's political stability. The NOC must position and prepare itself for these uprisings. How do we do this? First, we must describe where we are in the current social struggle and why. The cadre who formed the NOC were either from, or for a long time had carried out agitation within, the social sector that was the first to be laid off and pushed into permanent unemployment. This sector was, in the major cities, overwhelmingly black and brown. The new means of production naturally progressed from simple to complex operations. Consequently, the workers in the simple or unskilled sector of industry were the first to be replaced. This was the sector where, for historical reasons, the blacks and browns were concentrated. Not understanding the dialectics of history, sociologists invented the term "underclass" and applied it to this new class of structurally and permanently unemployed or under-employed workers. We learned a long time ago not to assume that just because a number of people are doing the same thing that they are all doing it for the same reason. We are finding out that some of the cadre have worked among the black and brown workers because they were the core of the most oppressed and exploited. There were some who worked among the most exploited and oppressed because they were black and brown. This did not make much difference so long as conditions did not allow for the outward expansion of our agitation. One of the negative results of this period was our inability to create an African American Liberation Committee. We could not do it because our work in the economic stratum of the permanently unemployed overlaid and intertwined with our African American liberation work. Increasingly, that is no longer true. The economic revolution has changed the concept of the "most exploited and oppressed." Today, that emphasis is linked to the formation of the new class. We can no longer be satisfied with activity only at that point where the economic struggle of the most exploited intersects with the national liberation movement. Theoretical inquiry alerts the comrades to changes in a process. Theory tells us that the shift of the cutting edge of the revolution from national liberation to class is just about complete in all countries. It is complete in the legal sense here. Any further progress on the part of the oppressed peoples is going to come from a revolution -- the reorganization of society -- not from reforming the legal system of the country. Battle lines are being re-drawn; forces that under one condition were remote reserves are now being thrown into the forefront of the struggle. The importance of this moment can be understood only if our comrades and friends take the subjective element -- color -- out of the objective process -- the class struggle. To consider the subjective factor, color, in theoretical inquiry is just as harmful as disregarding it in political analysis. The underlying determining forces in social evolution are objective. The politics of how it gets there depends upon subjective factors. Let us take the example of the African American in Southern agriculture prior to the invention of the mechanical cotton picker. Since cotton was an item of international commerce, the sharecropper in Mississippi, the serf in Egypt and the peasant in India engaging in cotton culture lived on about the same economic level. Their mutual competition guaranteed that. In each of these countries a subjective factor was used politically to keep them down and impotent. In one instance the factor was religion, in another color. The advent of the mechanical cotton picker, which objectively was a more efficient means of production, put an end to their deplorable condition. In this country, the fight against the political and economic conditions brought about by sharecropping was couched in racial rather than economic terms. All the strategies evolving from the racial point of view failed so long as the productive forces did not change. With the change in the productive forces, changed economic conditions allowed for the victory of the freedom movement. It would be very, very wrong to start from the proposition that this was, finally, a victory of the African American. It was a victory for the development of the means of production in cotton culture. This and this alone allowed for the subjective -- the political victory of the civil rights movement, which fought it out on the basis of the color factor and not on the basis of the economic foundation. In much the same way, we must theoretically understand the decisive moment of history we are entering. Years of describing economic phenomena in racial terms has disoriented the thinking of the Left. Some organizations are still calling for all-black unity as the political foundation for equality. Others are proposing that all whites enjoy an economic bribery at the expense of all blacks. As a great thinker wrote some 500 years before Christ, "Nothing endures but change." What was or appeared to be under certain circumstances is giving way to change. When the economic base of politics changes, the politics must change. That change may be ever so slow or contorted, but it must come. The economic foundation for all-white unity was created by African American slavery. This foundation was undercut by the mechanization of Southern agriculture. It was further undercut by the development of the multinational corporation and is now being liquidated by the shift to high technology in production. The economists and bourgeois sociologists are constantly warning the ruling class of the inevitable political consequences of the spread of poverty into that sector of the class that provides the ruling class its political stability. The Chicago Tribune editorial of Dec. 1, 1993 (among a number of recent articles) joined in sounding the alarm: "If Americans think the black underclass is a strain on the social system, [social scientist Charles] Murray says, wait till they see what results from a far bigger white underclass." In a relatively short time, America is going to hear from that section of the new proletariat that has never faced the problems of national oppression. The changes in mass psychology leading to such an event are taking place underground, so to speak. They become apparent only at the time of quite dramatic events. Are we organizationally positioned or politically prepared for such an event? No, we are not, nor could we be until conditions began to change. These changes are taking place. The ruling class is taking the necessary steps to position itself for the inevitable events. We absolutely must do the same. What must we do? First, we must be ideologically clear as to the nature of the developing social motion. The NOC has grown to the extent that it positioned itself where social oppression and economic exploitation intersect and then dug deep. That was a good place and way to begin. The problem is that digging deep is a defensive strategy and the class is moving into an offensive position. Sections of the working class that were secure against the cyclical crisis are being attacked by the economic revolution. No one is safe. The people of a whole new geographic area -- the Rust Belt -- are only now beginning to awaken to the understanding that the government is not going to help them and that their deepening poverty is permanent unless they do something about it. We have established firm base areas. We must now move outward to organize, educate and propagandize this new emerging social force. We cannot accomplish this if we proceed from the "black worker, white worker" concept. We must proceed from the scientifically, objectively substantiated, abstract understanding of the historical motion of a class. In specific social activity, certainly, color is bound to play a role. We disregard this reality at our peril. The point is, it is time to declare war on the ideology of the 1960s that began by proposing that the white workers were inherently reactionary and that ended up proposing a white working class and a black working class. We have not and must not change our basic tactic in the struggle for outward motion. That tactic is to carry out the struggle for political unity (unity in the social struggle) where economic equality exists. Any other tactic ends up calling for unity on a moral basis. We must never forget the fundamental law of politics: No one can for long cling to a political morality that contradicts their economic wellbeing. We must develop a tactical doctrine of entering these new areas of struggle. To begin with, we must reassert the time-honored slogan of "all for each and each for all." No matter where the attacks against our class brothers and sisters take place, we must go there with our agitation. We must carry this agitation into other areas that are open to us. The dialectic of this process must be the most careful planning followed by the most militant activity. History is turning favorably toward the revolution. The turn will not come easily. Ideologically, the muck of ages must be cleared away. That can only be done by brave revolutionaries locked in hard and consistent struggle -- but today it can be done. As so often happens in history, the success of a great social movement depends, at a critical juncture, upon the capabilities of a small but determined force. History will not find us lacking. Comrades, with pride in our NOC, with confidence in ourselves and our science, with clarity in our mission and its historic importance, let us militantly set about the work we must do. ****************************************************************** 4. GETTING TO THE SOURCE: WHERE HAVE THE JOBS GONE? A column about the underlying causes of the problems we face ****************************************************************** [This is the first in a series of articles on the program of the National Organizing Committee. The "program of action and education" is the basis around which we can build.] The first paragraph of the program reads: "This is an era of revolutionary change. Electronic technology is replacing human labor with computers and robots. Human labor is becoming worthless to a system that values only what it can exploit. The economic revolution is turning millions of people in this country into economic refugees." Where have the jobs gone? This most serious question is the key to understanding what's going on in the world today as well as what is going to happen. The world and the things that happen in the world are very complex. The first thing the people who control us have to do is to convince us, the little people, that we cannot understand the real world because they are the people who rule. We, the little people, made the world. We can understand it. We do have to put aside the pat slogans and examine the process we all have gone through. First, what is a job? There was work before there were jobs. A job includes work, but it is more. I get a job when some employer agrees to purchase my labor power. He buys me for 40 hours and pays me what I'm worth. What am I worth? They figure my worth the same way they figure the worth of anything else for sale. I'm worth what it costs to make me. And what is that? The cost of the bacon and beans, the clothing, medical care, the education and so on that went into making me. If the cost of producing me goes up, then I can sell myself for more. If it goes down, I'm worth less. Now what has happened? Let's take any industry -- let's take the dress-making industry. When that industry was broken up into the steps of pattern-making, cutting, sewing, and pressing, educating a person for any of those tasks became less complicated and cost very little. It wasn't very heavy work, so food costs were low. Housing? That also was low. Therefore, the cost of creating the average textile worker was low. Consequently, the pay was low, but it was a job. They needed people to do this work. The cost of the average dress was also low which meant the person who wore the dress didn't have to be paid much in order to buy it. Then came the time of so-called improvements in the dress-making industry. First came improvements to cut labor time, to have the worker do more in less time. At that point jobs began to disappear. One worker could suddenly do two workers' work. Then the pay was cut in half, or one was fired. But still, there was work to be done and an expanding economy found some kind of work for most, although the real wages -- the rent and potato wage system -- began to fall. Today, real wages are lower than they were in 1965. Then came the computer and the robot. Today, they can and do make dresses by feeding the information into a computer -- color, size, etc. The robot does the rest. Not a human hand touches the material being made. The computer and robot don't need food, shelter and clothing. Suddenly, the jobs disappear in textiles because of a combination of robots and concentrating three or four jobs in the hands of one person. Since the cost of production of the robot is smaller than the cost of a human, taking into account the amount of work each does, the labor and the laborer become worthless. This is why you have this new terrible thing -- absolute poverty. The poverty-stricken are worthless. Nobody wants to, or can, buy their ability to work. It is worthless compared to the productivity and costs of a robot. The problem now is: Since the computer doesn't dress up, who is to buy what is produced? You know this country is in crisis. This is what is behind the crisis. The economy -- that is, the way things are produced and distributed -- is the foundation for the society and the political system. It is not possible to change the foundation and not change the society and political system. This is where the jobs have gone and why this country is heading into some kind of revolution. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ For More Information ... For a basic explanation of the wages system: _Wage Labor and Capital_ by Karl Marx. (Available in libraries.) For more information on the effect of electronics on society: _Entering an Epoch of Social Revolution_ by Nelson Peery. (Available from Workers Press, P.O. Box 3705, Chicago, IL 60654, $3.00 per copy.) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The National Education Committee of the National Organizing Committee welcomes your comments, questions and suggestions on this column. Please write to us at: National Education Committee, NOC, P.O. Box 477113, Chicago, IL 60647. ****************************************************************** ****************************************************************** RALLY, COMRADES! (Electronic Edition) is the electronic version of RALLY, COMRADES!, a newspaper published by the Political Committee of the National Organizing Committee. The name of the paper is taken from the original chorus of the poem and song, _The International_, the rallying cry of the international proletariat: Rally, Comrades 'Tis the last fight we face The international Shall be the human race. Please address all correspondence to: RALLY, COMRADES!, P.O. Box 477113, Chicago, IL 60647, or e-mail jdav@igc.org. (c) 1994 by the National Organizing Committee. Hard copy subscriptions are available for $15/year, and donations are welcome. We encourage reproduction and use of all articles. Please credit RALLY COMRADES. ******************************************************************