Break with the Democrats–– For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Bush to America: No Pensions,
No Jobs, No Rights
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 842, 18
February 2005.
In this era of spin control, Bush's speechwriters turn to the classic rule of thumb: list a person's most shameful and repulsive traits and turn them into virtues. Thus, in his inaugural address, George W. Bush proclaimed that all have "rights, and dignity, and matchless value," that "oppression is always wrong," and that "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains...or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies." The hundreds imprisoned without a shred of due process since the September 11 attacks, the victims of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the Iraqis slaughtered in the service of "liberation," and those who dissent, now defined de jure as terrorists, are supposed to have no quarrel—they are made in the "image of the Maker of Heaven and earth," and "the Author of Liberty." Interspersed in the address by Bush-the-rehired is a recruiting pitch for "our youngest citizens...to serve in a cause larger than your wants." Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
"Ownership" and a "more prosperous and just and equal" society are promised, but what is projected is that future generations of working people will see the pittance currently available to them from Social Security slashed, their years of toil extended and health care increasingly unaffordable. Under these proposals, the journey in store for most of the aged and infirm would be from dog food to the dumpster.
At a January 11 forum in Washington, D.C., Bush declared: "African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the [Social Security] system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people." The fact that black men have a lower life expectancy than others powerfully illustrates the entrenched and vicious racial oppression of black people. But for Bush, this is a virtue to be cynically extolled to promote a Social Security "reform" scheme that would gut retirement benefits for all working people. This blatant racism barely elicited a response—such is today's reactionary social climate where black people's exclusion from a decent life is to be accepted as a given for all time.
There has been much hand-wringing over Bush's re-election. There is much to worry about. Bush seems to really believe he can conquer the world, a "vision" usually addressed by the appropriate psychopharmacological agents. And although the cloying incense of religion has been used before to mask the putrefaction of carnage and social decay, there is something almost uniquely vile about being subjected to not-quite-literate sermons by a combat-dodging rich kid who views protest as treason. Minus the grandiosity, however, Bush's proposals are a variation of the depredations that have been visited on working and poor people for the past three decades under both Democratic and Republican regimes.
The pillaging and degradation of working people during this period have been nothing short of breathtaking. The share of total wages garnered by the lower 90 percent of the population has fallen by 13 percent. Meanwhile, the real income of the top .01 percent quadrupled.
With the deindustrialization of the nation, good jobs—those that pay something approximating a living wage—are few. Such hiring as has gone on in this, the up-phase of an economic recovery, has mostly been into McJobs in the retail, service and wholesale industries. Since Bush took office, more than 2.6 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. The labor participation rate (which includes those working and actively seeking employment) has been in a long decline and has now reached the lowest level since 1988, 65.8 percent of the working age population. Meanwhile, people 55 and older—most of them forced back to work after retirement—have become the fastest-growing portion of the workforce, comprising 14.3 percent of the workforce in 2002.
These developments reflect the normal dynamic of the capitalist system in the absence of significant labor struggle. As described by Marx, that dynamic is the accrual of profits and wealth by the owners of the means of production at one pole and the increasing misery and degradation of the producers of that wealth, labor, at the other pole.
For Class War, Not Massacre of Workers Rights!
For this reason, the only effective way for the working class to defend its interests is through class-struggle means—strikes, labor protests, plant occupations. But the trade-union tops have by and large abandoned effective means of class struggle. When pressed by the workers to strike, they have enforced the restraints of bourgeois legislation, like the Taft-Hartley Act, designed to vitiate the workers' ability to shut down production, hurt the capitalists' flow of profits and beat back the scabs. If forced to strike, usually these types have quickly thrown in the towel, often signing such egregious giveback contracts as to call into question the value of ever walking a picket line. A recent example of this was the UFCW grocery workers strike in late 2003-04 over the burning issues of health care and pensions. Despite the determined militancy of the workers, the UFCW leadership sold them out. The current trade-union bureaucracy is an obstacle to waging militant class struggle because it is tied to the capitalist system and subservient to its state apparatus. Its support to the Democratic Party is in direct counterposition to independent class struggle.
It is precisely because the Democrats are the other party of the ruling class that they have had nothing of substance to say to America's working and poor people in general and only the meekest response to Bush's agenda. Around the inauguration many Democrats praised Bush's triumph in pulling off the sham elections in Iraq. Indeed, in their quest to regain power over the government, they are now trying to compete with the Republicans in "family value"-speak, as witnessed by Hillary Clinton's recently revealed religiosity and her attempts at finding "common ground" with the right-wing, anti-abortion bigots.
Reflecting the real concerns of sectors of the ruling class over mushrooming deficit spending, the Democrats have, since the reign of Ronald Reagan, increasingly tried to cast themselves as the defenders of fiscal responsibility. It should be remembered that it was Bill Clinton who savaged welfare and, with it, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, this when the economy was booming and government deficits were vanishing. It was also under Clinton that the prison system population soared, today reaching over two million.
Attacks on social programs, like welfare, which was justified through racist demonizing of black women, are detrimental to all workers, underlining the need for all working people to oppose them. As a November 2004 article in Monthly Review by Janine Fitzgerald pointed out, "The real winners of welfare reform are the companies seeking to hire low-wage workers. Not only does welfare reform create a mass of poor women desperate to find work and feed their children, it disciplines all low-wage workers. Desperate men and women who do not receive welfare know that if they complain or demand better wages, they can be replaced by even more desperate welfare mothers."
For years, many Democrats have put forward their own schemes for "reforming" Social Security, either by further raising the retirement age or by price indexing or both. Little wonder then that, in his "State of the Union" address, Bush was able to favorably cite these Democrats in promoting his plan to privatize Social Security. For both parties, the essential problem is that ordinary people are living too long.
Since the September 11 attacks, the Democrats have sought to outdo the Republicans on the "war on terror," whose real purpose is to increase the repressive powers of the state and attack democratic rights. While some Democrats expressed reservations about the Iraq war, they overwhelmingly voted for the USA-Patriot Act. Now that the popularity of the war and occupation, which are of no intrinsic value to America's imperialist rulers, has waned, many Democrats are pumping for a withdrawal in the short run with no diminution in their fervor for the "war on terror."
The strengthening of the repressive mechanisms of the bourgeois state, and the dismantling of benefits won in past social struggles, represent the American imperialist rulers' drive to plunder the working class and will not be fundamentally challenged by either of its political parties. In brief, imperialist war—the quest for profits and power abroad—is inextricably connected to the drive to increase profits and power at home, although the populace cannot be subjected to the same promiscuous slaughter that is visited on the foreign "enemy."
But Bush's agenda is hardly a done deal. There is considerable resistance to many of his current proposals as well as accruing discontents among those who have witnessed the slow transformation of the "American dream" into a nightmare over the past decades. In fact, his proposed budget cutbacks, although vicious, are, in financial terms, not of great scale. And should the partial privatization of Social Security be enacted, actual benefit reductions will not begin for years. But the magnitude of the degradation in the quality of life for most Americans over the past three decades cannot be denied.
In British playwright John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (written in 1956), the protagonist, Jimmy Potter, observes, "It's pretty dreary living in the American age—unless of course you're an American." This is no longer the case. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in 2000 American workers put in 17 percent more time on the job than their French counterparts and received two to three times fewer paid days off work than British and Swedish workers. While Americans spend the most for health care per capita in the world, increasingly out of pocket for working people, and with 45 million people having no health coverage at all, the World Health Organization ranks the U.S. 37th in the quality of health service. Not surprisingly, Americans have shorter life spans than their West European counterparts and the U.S. stands 26th in infant mortality rates among industrialized nations.
Every gain won by working people and the oppressed has been a product of fierce class and social struggles, like the giant labor struggles of the 1930s, which established industrial unions in this country. The so-called welfare state—in reality right-wing code for benefits to working people and the poor—that arose from those class battles never approached the level attained in West Europe in the aftermath of World War II. That said, it is precisely the residues of these battles that are and have been under attack by the ruling class. Meaningful public welfare for the time being has been massacred. Public housing, largely a dead letter for decades, is on the chopping block under Bush's budget. Food stamps are targeted for further attenuation, as are health benefits in the form of cutting Medicaid and support for training doctors and nurses.
What remain of the gains of those struggles are Social Security and its logical sequel Medicare, programs that entail massive social expenditures. It is all too understandable that many younger people tend to prefer the partial privatization of Social Security as there is nothing in their experience that would indicate that government intervention would be on their behalf. This perspective is both true and false. True, in that such reforms are always a sop offered by the bosses to placate and mitigate class-struggle opposition. False, in that a reversal of the gains of such struggles would embolden the bosses to intensify their drive to assert that the only right of working people is to go to work and receive, sometimes, a paycheck.
Less noticed has been the attack on public education. In the aftermath of World War II, under the GI Bill public education was expanded at relatively little expense to working-class youth who wanted to go to college. Many took those advantages, and many still hope to. But this is of little concern to the ruling elite for whom education for "others" is an extravagance only to be justified by the demands of maintaining the capitalist economic system.
Each year there is a seemingly inexorable rise in tuition and fees in both public and private colleges and universities, along with mounting budget cuts. For public, four-year colleges, the percentage of tuition costs covered by Pell Grants fell from 98 percent to 57 percent between 1986 and 1998. Under Bush's current budget proposals, Pell Grants will be increased at most by a scant $500 over the next five years while Perkins Loans, which provide as much as $4,000 a year for undergraduate students in financial need, will be abolished. Educated and idle minds provide little of service to the continuation of capitalist rule.
For a Workers Party!
The social and economic oppression of black people, at first in the form of chattel slavery and, since the defeat of Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War, in the form of race-color caste oppression, is a cornerstone of American capitalism. It reinforces backward consciousness within the working class, providing a wedge against concerted class action in opposition to capitalist rule, while establishing a minimum base for wages and social benefits. As Karl Marx expressed it almost 150 years ago, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." It is no accident that the three main periods of social struggle in America—the Civil War, the working-class battles in the 1930s and civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles of the 1950s and '60s—have all necessarily challenged black racial oppression. It is for this reason that the American socialist revolution will come to fruition only if the struggle against all exploitation and oppression is linked to the cause of black freedom.
In the Cold War against the USSR following World War II, anti-Communist national chauvinism was whipped up by the American ruling class, enabling them to re-ensconce a pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy by purging the reds who were key in building the mass industrial unions in the '30s, from the trade-union movement. Perhaps the most eloquent and dialectical explanation for both the quiescence and the defeats of the working class, as well as for its victories, was given by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in his 1940 piece, "The Class, the Party, and the Leadership":
"There is an ancient epigram from the evolutionist and liberal conception of history: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that one and the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments...and furthermore that the order of these governments doesn't at all proceed in one and the same direction: from despotism to freedom as was imagined by the liberal evolutionists. The secret is that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers that fall under different leadership; furthermore every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing ‘maturity' of a ‘people' but are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within one and the same class, and finally, the action of external forces—alliances, conflicts, wars, and so on....
"The very same dialectical approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality leadership is not at all a mere ‘reflection' of a class or the product of its own free creativeness. A leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the different layers within a given class."
The contradictions of capitalism inevitably produce class struggle. The question is, what leadership will the proletariat have. It is necessary to forge a class-struggle leadership in the unions that fights not only for immediate economic demands, but on broader social issues. Defense of immigrant rights against the government's "war on terror," defense of abortion and gay rights, freedom for death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and abolishing the racist death penalty—these are some of the causes that a class-struggle leadership would take up, mobilizing the massive power of the working class on the side of all the oppressed. It is in the crucible of such struggles that the cadres will be assembled to forge the internationalist revolutionary party that can lead the overturn of America's bloodsoaked capitalist imperialist system and form a workers government. This would provide the crucial beginning to the creation of a world socialist order that will end for all time the exploitation and oppression of man by man. The central purpose of the International Communist League at this juncture is to assemble and educate, in the school of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, the cadres who will build such a party.
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 842, 18 February 2005.