Young People's Socialist League

Recently, proposals have been introduced into the California State Legislature that would raise the minimum wage to $7.75 an hour by 2007, and an alternate version sponsored by the Democrats would actually tie it to inflation in order to combat the subsequent rise in prices. Naturally, all the typical bourgeois complaints arose from Republicans and other assorted capitalists. Where they would normally have bickered and whined about how inflation would actually hurt workers, they instead ranted over the steep rise in unemployment that would result. The saddest part, however, is that they are right.

Whenever gains in wages are made by labor at any point in history, the corresponding rise in prices from capitalists at leasts minimizes the gains if it does not cancel them out completely. Even worse, hikes in the minimum wage almost always spell unemployment for the most poor and uneducated workers, since the owners shall simply try to handle business without them if they feel they have to give too much away. (Generosity is not commonly known as a bourgeois trait.) So where, then, does that leave us? Is the proletariat to forever remain a slave to capital?

OF COURSE NOT! What this entire fiasco is is simply another example of the failure of reformism to adequately serve the needs of the working class. If he is not underpaid, then his wages are eaten up by inflation. If he is not oppressed and mistreated, then he is unemployed. The bottom line is: there is no future for any worker under capitalism. Since the birth of revolutionary socialism, all manner of liberal capitalists and bourgeois opportunists have sought some way to pacify the working class while still coddling their beloved little darling: private property. But as long as the bourgeoisie has control, wether through the tyranny of private ownership or the oligarchy of investors and stockholders, the working class can be neither comfortable nor secure.

The time has come for the proletariat to wake up, and realize the failure of every form of capitalism, be it the poverty and harshness of laissez-faire or the joblessness and economic stagnation of the welfare state. Not until we rise up and seize the means of production, not until capital has come under the democratic control of the working class, not until the worker's councils reign supreme will poverty ever be solved. Our destiny lies before us, my brothers, we need only reach out and take it.