The capitalist class is in deep crisis, and facing the necessity of taking extreme measures to restructure capital for its continued survival and reproduction. The struggle among them over how to handle this has been intensifying over the past 20 years or so, and is becoming ever more politically antagonistic. Even their bourgeois democratic structures such as Congress are becoming overwhelmed, increasingly inadequate as a field for the task of resolving this internal class conflict. The capitalist class is compelled to find some solution through their internal struggle, but they are incapable of doing so.

At the same time, there is a painful absence of an autonomous popular alternative to take advantage of this general and conjunctural crisis of capitalism. Though the capitalist class is in turmoil, the popular masses lack the political and ideological cohesion necessary to challenge them as a social force. The crisis of capitalism is structural, unsolvable within its own framework. In fact, CAPITALISM HAS NO SOLUTION.

The government shutdown is one element of their policy of structural adjustment, a way to make the popular masses pay for the failure of capitalism. Under the domination of the capitalist bloc, working people are engaged in a daily struggle for survival and reproduction. An employee confronted the CEO of McDonald’s, saying: “I worked for 10 years for McDonald’s, and I still can’t afford to buy a pair of shoes for my kids.” The government shutdown is an additional outrageous burden on the popular masses in the US, on top of the “ordinary” repression the capitalist class organizes against us every day. We cannot tolerate them continuing to squeeze us to save their rotten system. We must organize ourselves to give them the response they deserve.

Our solutions will not come from any sectors of the capitalist class, as many opportunist, broken-down, has-been politicians will attempt to have us believe. We cannot hope for help from any of them, whether Republican or Democrat. Our solutions will only be constructed in the struggle of autonomous combative mass movements. For us, the masses nationally and internationally, the politics of allying with one capitalist sector against the others has been a total failure, proven disastrously over and over again throughout history. They all want to suck our blood and live off our sweat; the only difference between them is how they do that. Instead, we need to build our own organized movements to wage battles against all of them, the entire bloc of the capitalist class. We must stop what they are doing to us. We must struggle together for our own collective interests, our survival.

We must organize and fight to get capitalism off our backs!