This week marks the one-year anniversary of the end of the Southern California grocery strike. I thought this might be a good time to look back and evaluate on where we stand after the longest labor strike in US history.

While the strike, on the surface, was about health care and a new second tier pay scale, that was only the shiny coating that the corporations and unions applied to win support for their side. The real issue behind the strike was survival.

The real reason for the strike, indeed for any strike, is because the society that we live in does not provide its citizens with the things that we need to live happy productive lives. While things like food, clothing, and health care are made available, they are available only at a price, and for most, never at the same time. If you do not have the resource to acquire these needs, you are simply out of luck.

The problem is that unionism is dependent on the working class never having enough. Unions, like most political parties themselves, need capitalism for its survival, and while capitalism is around, the problems the unions “face” will stick around as well.

The unions will never come out and say what I think we all should say, that capitalism will never provide us with the things we need. Through its wage labor, artificial scarcity and profit motive, capitalism will never be made to work for the working class. Why? Because it was never intended to. Capitalism works for the capitalist.

I picketed in front of my store for four and a half months, a period in which people sold their homes, held off needed surgeries, and cancelled Christmas. It is nothing that I wish to go through again, nor for anyone to go through. The reality however is that while capitalism exists, the strike will persist, but more importantly, the issues the people strike over will exist.

While the issues of health care, safe working conditions, and minimum wages will persist through out capitalism, only in a socialist based society will the issue of survival be addressed. Only in socialism will health care be made readily available. Only in socialism will there be no need for minimum wage because work will be voluntary and the needs of life will be freely accessible to all. Only in socialism can we achieve these things, and only the working class can bring it about.

Matthew Emmons,

World Socialist Party