Joblessness

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The joblessness crisis

The International Labor Organization, the labor agency of the United Nations has issued its annual report this week which documents a shocking fact ignored by most of the bourgeois mass media. According to this report some 820 million people, thirty percent of the world's workforce are unemployed or underemployed.

This rate of unemployment is higher than the figures reached during the Great Depression of the 1930's.

This fact by itself demolishes the twin myths of the triumph of capitalism and the collapse of communism. World capitalism staggers from crisis to crisis and has now reached the state of requiring for its survival the destruction of the most important of its own productive forces — the wiping out of the world proletariat.

The ILO report hems and haws on the subject of the possible remedies to this social catastrophe. On the one hand, the labor representatives of imperialism declare themselves in favor of free trade and the one global labor market. On the other hand, they bleat about the need for social welfare nets, retraining schemes and enlightened labor legislation. The two goals are, obviously, contradictory even on a purely pragmatic plane.

From the world historic viewpoint, it is obvious that Trotsky's statement that "The crisis of mankind is the crisis of revolutionary leadership" is powerfully vindicated.