This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/310/unity-in-struggles  [1]

No one really denies anymore that there is a health care crisis in the US. Every Republican and Democratic presidential hopeful is touting some kind of plan to fix it. In reality, there are two versions of the health care crisis in the US - one for the working class and a separate one for the ruling class.

The Health Care Crisis for the Workers

Any worker in America can give you the details on the health care crisis. Those who are lucky enough to have medical benefits at their jobs find that these benefits are under a generalized, all-out attack. Medical benefits have been a central feature in virtually every strike in the past three years, as workers seek to resist the erosion of their benefits. Costs for workers are spiraling out of control. It used to be that companies paid 100% for health insurance as part of the wage/benefit package. But today workers are forced to pay for a percentage of the medical premiums. Once management wins the end of 100% employer-paid insurance, the percentage workers must contribute is constantly being increased. Within the plans themselves, worker's costs are skyrocketing, co-pays, fees, and deductibles are constantly going up. Workers' insurance coverage is being eroded. Younger workers often lack coverage or have substandard coverage that doesn't cover much, and they have to pay exorbitant contributions to extend coverage to the entire family.

Quality of care is also declining, and the government keeps granting doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies exemptions from liability for malpractice, incompetence, and defective drugs with disastrous side effects. Then of course there are the estimated 46+ million Americans who have no medical insurance at all. While the poorest Americans are covered by Medicaid, sponsored by the federal government's social welfare system, and Medicare covers retired workers, increasing numbers of workers who earn too much to be covered by Medicaid are left to their own devices.   Recent court rulings have empowered unions and companies to drop retirees from medical insurance programs, forcing them to rely solely on Medicare and purchase their own supplemental coverage while retired from private insurance companies.

The Health Care Crisis for the Bourgeoisie

For the ruling class the health care crisis is that they are saddled with an incredibly inefficient and expensive system that damages American capitalism's economic competitiveness on the world market. Insurance costs, doctor fees, hospital costs, overhead and administrative costs are out of control. The US has the costliest health care system in the world, with per capita expenditures more than double that of most major industrialized nations. Health care costs as a percentage of GDP are 9.9% for Canada, 10.1% for France, and 8% for the United Kingdom, but an astronomical 15.2% for the US. And all of this extra cost provides an inferior quality medical care that makes the US look ridiculous on the international scene. Patient outcomes are among the worst in the industrialized world. In Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, life expectancy ranges from 79.5 years (France, UK) to 82.5 in Japan. In the US it lags behind at 77.  A study by the World Health Organization evaluating the overall quality of health systems ranked the US as 37th in the world, trailing behind Dominica, and Costa Rica. Infants born in the US are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway.

The cost of having so-many uninsured people actually hurts the US economy, as the  costs for emergency care for such patients is passed on to everyone else.  The dominant fractions of bourgeoisie see the value in rationalizing the system, getting more people covered to save overall costs and help competitiveness. So there should be no mistake. The motivation for health care reform is NOT to improve the health of workers in America, but rather to cut costs and improve competitiveness in the world economy.  The crisis is so serious actions are already being taken on a piece meal basis. Massachusetts, for example, has passed a plan to implement a near-universal mandatory coverage law, requiring residents to purchase health insurance - the so-called individual mandate.  Maine, Pennsylvania, and Vermont are also considering universal systems at the state level.  In California, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing a plan that also includes an individual mandate-requiring residents to purchase insurance coverage or pay extra taxes. Unions, especially the breakaway Social Employees international Union (SEIU) supports ending employer based health care and has actually teamed up with Wal-Mart to push this agenda on the "corporate elite."  SEIU Pres. Andy Stern is a strong advocate of this approach.

Health Care "Reform" and the Presidential Campaign

Presidential candidates in both parties are floating proposals to overhaul the health care system and to provide coverage for the uninsured. Republican candidates tend to propose some version of so-called "market-based" reforms that will use tax credits and deductions to encourage people to purchase medical insurance. The Democratic candidates tend to propose some form of direct government intervention to control costs and provide universal coverage.   For example, Republican Rudolph Giuliani has proposed granting tax credits of up to $7,500 for individuals and $15,000 for families, provided the money is spent on health care insurance -that gives you an idea of how expensive health insurance can be. Senator John McCain proposes a similar plan, with tax deductions of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is more vague, proposing a plan to "encourage the private sector to seek innovative ways to bring down costs and improve the free market for health care services." Mitt Romney proposes allowing the cost of insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to be taken as a tax deduction.

Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards advocate requiring health insurance for everyone, requiring employers to contribute to covering the costs and funding the rest by rescinding Pres. Bush's tax cuts on Americans earning over $250,000 per year. Barack Obama favors requiring only that all children will have to be covered by insurance, which he claims will lead to near universal coverage as families will wind up purchasing insurance for the parents as well.

Meaning of the proposed "reforms"

The campaign propaganda about "universal" health care has tremendous mystifying power for the ruling class. For individuals who currently have no health insurance, any of the plans proposed by the politicians surely sound like they'll be better than nothing. The leftists push for universal care as a central "reform" demand. In his recent Sicko documentary, filmmaker Michael Moore portrayed the health care systems in France, England, and Canada in the most idyllic light, as if those countries were heaven on earth. However, wherever these so-called universal plans exist, they are in crisis. Everywhere the bourgeoisie faces the same task, to cut costs, to attack health care. This is especially true as the post World War II baby boom generation begins to retire and suffers deteriorating health.

Whatever form they may take, the coming change in the health care system will NOT be a reform, not an expansion of health care, not an attempt to improve the health of the working class. It will be an austerity attack.  The goal is the same as in Europe --  to cut society's expenditure on health care. None of the plans will do anything to combat the erosion of health benefits for workers already insured at work - co-pays and premiums will go up, coverage will continue to deteriorate. Those covered by the new plan will pay a lot of money. Most of what has been proposed will only provide very basic coverage to the poorest people. Everyone who can "afford it"-i.e. the working class will have to take their employers' plan, or pay out of their own pocket for basic coverage. These plans give employers an incentive to drop coverage and pay less into the state fund instead. Coverage will decline for most who already have "good coverage".

The US ruling class is trying to manage a crisis that threatens its economic competitiveness, not to solve a medical crisis.  Yes, more people will be covered-but they will have to pay for it and coverage will be minimal with no reimbursement until you have paid considerable out of pocket expenses. The health care crisis is yet another manifestation of the general economic crisis of world capitalism. The attack on medical benefits and on pensions is essentially an attack on workers wages, the total compensation package paid to the workers for their labor. More and more the economic crisis forces the ruling class to attack the working class standard of living, amply demonstrating that capitalism has no future to offer humanity. The attacks on pensions and medical benefits pose life and death issues for the working class. Only the replacement of a society driven by the quest for profits, with one where the operating principle is the fulfillment of human needs offers the possibility to seriously address the health problems that we confront today. --J. Grevin, 1/8/08.

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/310/october-1917 [3]

In the last few months, there has been a series of simultaneous strikes and struggles in the US, the likes of which we haven't seen in quite a while. This includes a number of official union strikes, such as the strike by the Access-A-Ride drivers in New York who provide transportation for people with disabilities, as well as the Broadway theater stagehands, and the film and tv writers which has paralyzed production of new movies and television programs.The tendency of the working class in the US to come back to the path of the struggle also confirms that it is totally inscribed in the international resurgence of class struggle, which has been happening for the last four or five years across the globe, and was highlighted most importantly by the students' movement against the CPE in France in November 2005.

However, by far the most interesting struggle was the wildcat strike by so-called "free-lance workers" at MTV in New York City. These workers, many of them in their 20's and 30's, lead precarious existence but have long put up with little or no health care and relatively low wages because of the ‘glamour' associated with ‘working for MTV'. The bosses like to call them ‘free-lancers,' non-permanent employees, to justify the fact that they are not included in the standard benefits and wage programs at the company. MTV employs nearly 5,000 of these workers, who prefer to call themselves ‘permalancers', because many of them have been working for MTV for years. They are non-unionized, and treated as "independent contractors" by the company. When the company unilaterally announced a plan to cut their minimal medical benefits and contributions to their 401k retirement accounts on December 11, 2007 these young workers walked out spontaneously and took to the streets, carrying signs reading, "there are too many of us to ignore." And they did so again on January 3, 2008.

It's clear they have become painfully aware of their proletarianized status and totally identify themselves as workers, with the same needs, and the same plight, as their own parents. In the heat of the struggle, MTV workers not only identified themselves with the rest of the working class, but, in an echo of the methods used by their class brothers in France at the time of the struggles against the CPE, they also attempted to self-organize. At the walkout on December 14, a list was circulated of everyone's personal email address, so "...we can organize a website that people can go to for information." They also organized groups of delegates to approach the film and television writers, who were on strike at the same time.

While this mobilization has not seen the maturity or development of the students' movement in France, we see the reflection of the same dynamic toward the search for solidarity and the recognition of class identity. In the words of one young demonstrator: "We are not free-lancers because we come in and work at the same place every day, don't work on equipment we own, have taxes taken out of our paychecks, and report to people that are staff." The result of this struggle is that MTV reinstated the 401k plan that it had rolled back, and conceded health benefits for workers who had worked steadily since March, without an additional waiting period, as envisioned in the new package to take effect on January 1. But the MTV workers are not settled yet on the health care plan, which, under the proposed package, includes higher deductibles and a $2,000 cap on hospital expenses each year.

Although these workers did not win a clear victory in this confrontation, it is clear that the bosses want to avoid an all-out confrontation. Above all, their struggle shows the capacity of the workers to take the struggle into their own hands, to organize autonomously and to the see the possibility to seek unity with other workers in struggle.

Where workers are unionized, their only weapon is their militancy. The building cleaners, doormen, and elevator operators' carried out a series of mass demonstrations in Manhattan in December reflecting their militancy and threatening to strike on New Year's Day. The strike was averted by a last minute tentative agreement -that still has to be ratified - which includes increases of 20 percent in management contributions to the health benefit and of 40 percent to the pension benefit funds. In addition wages will increase by 4.18 percent a year for the next four years. Also, many jobs have been transformed from part time to full time and many janitors were given family health coverage. Of course this isn't the "big" victory that the union claims, because these workers' wages and benefits have been always very low to begin with. But it is certain that if the workers had not been as militant, they would have gotten a much worse deal.

In the film and television writers strike the unions have done their time-honored job of sabotaging the struggle. The demands of the writers, to share in the revenues from the sales of DVDs and online downloads of the shows they have written, have widespread support in the industry. Many actors who sympathize with the striking writers have refused to cross the picketline, but the dozen or more unions in the entertainment and broadcasting industry (separate unions for actors, news writers, news reporters, carpenters, electricians, stagehands etc) have maintained their institutionalized tradition of not only crossing each other's picket lines, but of never asking other workers to respect the pickets, let alone join the struggle. Nevertheless, despite their relatively high salaries and "glamour" jobs, the writers are increasingly aware of their proletarianized situation, as illustrated by remarks by one writer at a Writers Guild of America meeing shortly before the strike began: "This (residual payment for the DVDs and downloads) is such a big issue that if they see us roll over on this without making a stand, three years from now, they're gonna be back for something else. ...it'll be ‘we want to revamp the whole residual system,' and in another three years, it'll be "y'know what, we don't really want to fund the health fund the way we've been.' And then it will be pension. And then it'll be credit determination. And there just is that time when everybody has to see-this is one where we just gotta stand our ground."

These recent developments confirm what we wrote in Internationalism 143, that the NYC Transit workers' strike of December 2005 marked in the US the entrance to a "...period in which the class struggle will once more be at the center stage of the social situation during which the bourgeoisie's policies of austerity and war will not go unchallenged." The recent and present struggles are a manifestation that this new period is beyond simply a ‘beginning'; it is now maturing, and the perspective can only be that of extension and strengthening of the confrontations and of class consciousness. As we said above, this is an international development in which the workers in the US are full participants.

Today in the belly of the beast, the workers' struggles are demystifying the bourgeoisie's campaign about the ‘superiority' of American-style capitalism and how it benefits the workers' standard of living. This is a ‘gain' that goes beyond an immediate victory on the defensive terrain, because it teaches the workers that the present struggles are only a preparation for a much bigger struggle against this dying system. The working class is undergoing a tremendous reflection and the dynamics of its struggle show a growing maturation of the understanding of the need for solidarity and the impasse of capitalism. This dynamic will deepen and extend as the workers engage in the struggles and become more and more conscious of the task their class has to carry out. A new period has opened up toward important confrontations between the two leading classes in our society. Our responsibility is not to stand and watch but to intervene to help the class advance its understanding of what needs to be done and how to do it. Ana 1/5/08

As 2007 come to a close the American bourgeoisie was not in a party mood and rightly so, because there wasn't much to celebrate for American capitalism. By all accounts 2007 has been a horrendous year for the US economy. It opened with the bursting of the real estate bubble, then in the summer came the bust of the financial sector, a series of mini-crashes of the stock market, and the drastic devaluation of the dollar. Finally, to top it all off, the year ended with ominous news of low job creation, anemic holiday season sales and fears of rising inflation, fueled by the rising prices of oil and other commodities.

Understandably as the new year begins the mood in the ruling class is beset by gloomy forecasts for the coming year. In fact, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. 2008 does not promise to be much better than 2007. On the contrary even by the most optimistic predictions, the worst is still to come.

A worsening economic crisis

The bourgeoisie's official definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Based on the avalanche of bad economic news that have come out in the last weeks, some economists are saying that a recession may have already begun in December. However not all economists are convinced that things are that bad. Despite all the bad news, the GDP is still showing small positive growth rates today, so, some economists express hope that the American economy may avoid falling into a recession. On the other hand some other experts think "it literally could go either way."

These predictions that fill the pages of the economic sections of newspapers and magazines are very misleading. In the last instance they only contribute to hide the catastrophic state of American capitalism that can only get worse in the months to come regardless of whether or not the economy officially enters recession.

What is important to emphasize is that we're not talking about a supposedly "healthy" American economy that is simply going through a troubled phase in a supposedly normal business cycle of expansion and bust. What we are witnessing are the convulsions of a system in a chronic state of crisis that can only buy ephemeral moments of "health" by toxic remedies that will only aggravate the next catastrophic collapse.

This has been the history of American capitalism -and worldwide capitalism- since the end of the sixties with the return of the open economic crisis. For the last four decades through official expansions and busts the overall economy has only kept a semblance of functionality thanks to systematic state capitalist monetary and fiscal policies that the government is obliged to apply to fight the effects of the crisis. However the situation has not remained static. During these decades of crisis and state intervention to manage it, the economy has accumulated so many absurdities that today there is a real threat of an economic catastrophe, the likes of which we have not seen in the history of capitalism.

The bourgeoisie bought its way out of the burst of the tech/internet bubble in 2000/01 by creating a new bubble based, this time, on real estate. Despite the fact that key industries in the manufacturing sector -the auto and air line industries for instance- continue going bankrupt, the real estate boom for the last five years gave the semblance of an expanding economy. Now the boom has transformed itself into the present bust that has shaken the whole edifice of the capitalist system and which will still have future repercussions that no one can yet predict.

According to the latest data about the real estate crisis, the activity related to private housing is in total disarray. The construction of new homes has already fallen by around 40 percent since its peak in 2006; sales have fallen even faster dragging down with it prices. Home prices have dropped by 7 percent nation-wide since the peak in 2006 with predictions that they will fall by another 15 to 20 percent before hitting bottom. The real estate boom has left a huge inventory of vacant unsold homes - about 2.1 million, or about 2.6 percent of the nation's housing supply. And the glut is bound to increase as the wave of foreclosures continues to broaden, hitting even borrowers with supposedly good credit. Last year's foreclosures were mostly limited to the so-called subprime mortgages -loans given to people with essentially no means to repay. Nearly one-fourth of such loans were in default by last November. Although default rates on loans given to people with relatively good credit are much lower, they are also rising. In November, 6.6 percent of these loans were either delinquent, in foreclosure, or had been repossessed. In a sign of worse things to come, this spike in foreclosures is happening even before many mortgages have reset to higher interest rates.

The bursting of the real estate bubble is wreaking havoc in the financial sector. So far the crisis in real estate has generated over 100 billion dollars in losses at the world's largest financial institutions. Billions of dollars in stock market value have been wiped out, rocking up Wall St. Among the big names that lost at least a third of their value in 2007 were Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Moody's, and Citigroup. MBIA, a company that specializes in guaranteeing the financial health of others, lost nearly three-quarters of its value! Several of yesterday's high-flying mortgage related companies have gone bankrupt.

And this is only the beginning. As foreclosures accelerate in the coming months banks will be counting new losses and the credit crunch already in place will tighten up even more, impacting other sectors of the economy.

Moreover, the financial crisis related to the mortgages is only the tip of the iceberg. The same reckless lending practices that we are learning were dominant in the mortgage market are also the norm in the credit card and auto loans industries, where problems are also increasing. And here lies the essence of today capitalism's "health". Its little dirty secret is the perversion of the mechanism of credit as a way to buy its way out of a lack of solvent markets to sell its commodities. Lending is no longer a promise of repayment with a profit backed up by some material reality (i.e., collateral) that can stimulate capitalist development. It has become a way of keeping the economy artificially afloat and preventing the collapse of the system under the weight of its historic crisis. Already in the 1980's the financial crisis that followed the bust of the Latin American economies weighed down by debts that they had no means to repay demonstrated the limits of credit as a remedy to deal with the crisis. The same lesson could have been learned in 1997 and 1998 at the time of the collapse of the Asian tigers and dragons, and Russia's default on its debt. In fact the housing bubble was a reaction and an effort to overcome the burst of tech/internet bubble. One can justly pose the question, what is the next bubble going to be?

Yet there is another aspect of the present financial crisis. This is the rampant speculation that accompanied the real estate bubble. What we are talking about is not small time speculation by an individual investor buying a house and quickly flipping it to make a quick buck from the fast appreciation of the value of the property. This is peanuts. What really counts is the big time speculation that all the major financial institutions engaged in through the securitization and selling of mortgage-debt in the stock market. The exact mechanisms of these schemes are not easy to come by, but from what is known they look very much like the age old ponzi schemes. In any case, what this monstrous level of speculation shows is the degree to which the economy has become a "casino economy" where capital is not invested in the real economy, but instead it is used to gamble.

The medicine is not working

The American bourgeoisie likes to present itself as the ideological champion of free market capitalism. This is nothing other than ideological posturing. An economy left to function according to the laws of the market has no place in today's capitalism, dominated by omnipresent state intervention. This is the sense of the "debate" within the bourgeoisie on how to manage the present economic mess. In essence there is nothing new being put forward. The same old monetary and fiscal policies are applied in hope to stimulate the economy. Among the big proposals are lower taxes and rising spending - public projects like public infrastructure expansion: highways, bridges, airports.

For the moment what is already being done is also the application of the same old policies of easy money. So far the Federal Reserve has cut its interest rate benchmark three times and seems posed to do so once more this month. In a desperate move to bolster liquidity on the credit market it offered a big Christmas gift -cheap multibillion emergency dollars - to the financial institutions that were short on cash.

Perspectives

What these efforts by the State to manage the crisis will amount to remains to be seen. What is evident is that more than ever the bourgeoisie has less margin of maneuver for its economic policies. After decades of managing the crisis, the American bourgeoisie sits on a very sick economy. The monstrous national debt, the federal budget deficit, the fragile financial system, all this makes it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to deal with the collapse of its system.

For the working class the aggravation of the economic crisis will undoubtedly bring more misery as it deals with the attacks that the bourgeoisie will launch to try to make it bear the impact of its economic difficulties. It is time to prepare to defend itself and give society a different perspective than the present madness of capitalism.

- Eduardo Smith 1/13/08

 

The hype about the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary seems overwhelming. But it is still too early to tell what consensus will emerge in the dominant circles of the American ruling class about the political division of labor that will best serve its interests in the period ahead. However, it is clear that what is at stake for American capitalism in the coming presidential election are a) a break with the Bush administration's disastrous imperialist policies in order to significantly restore American authority on the international level, and b) a total refurbishment of the democratic mystification, which has taken a terrible beating since the year 2000.

Restoring American Imperialist Authority

Even before the November election, the bourgeoisie has made great strides in setting the stage for a full scale redressment of the catastrophic imperialist policy of the Bush administration. With virtually all of the neo-cons driven from the administration and the forced resignation of their close ally, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney is essentially the only hardcore hawk remaining in the inner circles of the administration. The permanent bureaucracy in the State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA, which represents the continuity of American imperialist policy through both Democratic and Republican administrations since the collapse of Russian imperialism in 1989, is increasingly exerting its influence in Washington. The neutralization of the Cheney-inspired campaign to stir up yet another preventative war, this time against Iran, is testimony to the power of this permanent bureaucracy. Career foreign service officials opposed the war plans as yet another irrational policy that would further isolate US imperialism on the international level. Military leaders were painfully aware that American forces are already stretched way too thin to sustain a third front in yet another theatre. And the intelligence bureaucracy, sick and tired of having its intelligence gathering manipulated and twisted by Cheney and the neo-cons with disastrous consequences, gave the administration's bellicose Iran policy the kiss of death by releasing its National Intelligence Estimate findings that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program over three years ago, thus eliminating the rationale of the Bush administration's bellicose policy.

This sets the stage for an even more far reaching realignment of imperialist policy, regardless of whoever wins the White House in November. It is perhaps noteworthy that Huckabee, the surprise winner in the Iowa Republican race, was the only candidate to denounce Bush's foreign policy as "arrogant, bunker mentality." Likewise, in the Democratic race, Obama, who has emerged as the main alternative to Clinton, was the only candidate who could claim that he had been opposed to the war in Iraq from the very beginning. Regardless of who wins the nomination, the struggle of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie to pursue a more sophisticated, more "multilateral" imperialist policy, that will lessen American imperialism's growing isolation and reestablish its authority on the international level seems to be making significant headway.

Refurbishing the Democratic Mystification

Initially it seemed that the 2006 election constituted a reinvigoration of an electoral mystification that had been badly tarnished by both the stolen presidential election of 2000 and the failure of the American ruling class to accomplish its belated 2004 consensus on the need to elect John Kerry president. By contrast, the 2006 election which put the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, was portrayed in the capitalist media and by prominent politicians in both major parties, as an expression of the political will of the American people for an end to the war in Iraq, for a change in political direction at the national level. Politicians and political pundits alike threw around phrases like "a swing in the political pendulum," and a "tremendous blow to the Republican party," and there was growing acceptance of the notion that the Republicans were destined to take up the role of political opposition in the future political division of labor. For a while it truly seemed like the sorely eroded public confidence in the electoral process had been restored in the general population, including the working class. But this proved to be short lived as the failure of the Democrats to overcome the Bush administration's continued resistance to end the war in Iraq revived skepticism about the effectiveness of electoralism as a means of expressing the "popular will." Public opinion polls showed the approval ratings of both Bush and Congress hovering at record low levels, approaching 29%. The electorate was just as fed up with the Democrats as they were with the Republicans.

The bourgeoisie desperately needs the 2008 election to revive its central ideological swindle, the idea that participation in its elections is the means to achieve peaceful change in the direction of society. Having squandered the fruit of its 2006 election so quickly and given the persistent difficulty of the bourgeoisie's dominant fractions to control the electoral process in the context of worsening social decomposition, it is not clear whether the ruling class will be successful in reinvigorating the democratic mystification.

Sensing inevitable victory at the polls, Democratic politicians with presidential ambitions started the electoral circus so early this time around that they pose the potential of mutually destroying each other's political prospects by the time the primaries are over. Having started out riding a tidal wave of opposition to the war in Iraq, most of the major Democratic candidates now openly acknowledge that an early troop withdrawal is impossible and predict that troops will have to remain in Iraq for quite some time.

Prominent politicians from both parties are openly pondering whether the traditional two-party system is now too badly bent or broken to effectively serve the political interests of the ruling class and is considering support for a serious independent candidate. In their call for a two-day conference in Oklahoma in early January, former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, who served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Democratic Senator David L. Boren of Oklahoma, who served as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote, "Today we are a house divided. We believe that the next president must be able to call for a unity of effort by choosing the best talent available - without regard to political party - to help lead our nation." They went on to state, "Most importantly, we must begin to restore our standing, influence and credibility in the world." Other prominent participants include: former Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb of Virginia (son-in-law of President Lyndon Johnson); Bill Brock, former Republican Party chairman and former Tennessee U.S. Senator; Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa; former Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, who also served in the U.S. Senate; departing Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who served on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and denounced the Bush administration's Iraq policy as the greatest foreign policy mistake in American history; and ex-Democrat, ex-Republican New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire ready and able to not only offer himself as the nominee but also able to spend $1 billion of his $12 billion personal fortune to fund the campaign.

Whatever the outcome, the stakes are high for the bourgeoisie, but will mean nothing for the working class except that we will be subjected to a more finely tuned political propaganda used to manipulate us to accept the austerity policies employed to make us bear the brunt of the economic crisis and the imperialist policy that uses us as cannon fodder for American capitalism. -- Jerry Grevin, Jan. 5, 2008

On February 28th, even though he acknowledged the risk of an economic slowdown, President George W. Bush declared, "I don't think we're headed for a recession...I believe that our economy has got the fundamentals in place for us...to grow and continue growing, more robustly than we're growing now. So we're still for a strong dollar." Two weeks later, on March 14th, the President reaffirmed his optimistic outlook before a meeting of economists in New York City, where he expressed confidence in the "resilient" American economy. He did this on the very day that the Federal Reserve and JP Morgan Chase were forced to collaborate on an emergency bailout plan for Bear Stearns, the Wall Street investment bank, after it suffered a run on the bank reminiscent of the Great Depression; and crude oil prices hit a record high $111 per gallon, despite the fact that supply far exceeds demand; and the government announced that mortgage foreclosures rose 60 percent in February; and the dollar hit a record low against the Euro. Bush's denial of reality notwithstanding, it is clear that appearance of prosperity that accompanied the housing boom and real estate economic bubble of the last few years has given way to a full-blown economic catastrophe in the world's largest and strongest economy, thus putting the economic crisis in the forefront of the international situation

In the article about the economy in the last issue of Internationalism we warned that the "worst is still to come. The ink was barely dry before that prediction was confirmed. Ever since the first signs that the housing boom was coming to an end at the beginning of 2007 the bourgeois economists have been playing at setting the odds of a recession in US economy. At the start of this year the field was still quite open, stretching from the ‘pessimists' who thought that a recession had already started in December, to the ‘optimists' who were still expecting a miracle that would avoid it. In the middle, placing a safer bet, were the uncommitted experts saying that the economy "could literally go either way." Things have gone so bad so fast in the last two months that there is not more room for optimism or ‘centrism'; the consensus is now that the good times have come to an end. In other words the American economy is now in recession or, at best, on the brink of one.

However this recognition of American capitalism's troubles has little value for understanding the real state of the system. The official bourgeois definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. A slightly better definition used by the National Bureau of Economic Research mentions a significant, protracted decline in activity that cuts across the economy, affecting measures like income, employment, retail sales and industrial production. On the basis of these definitions the bourgeoisie can't officially designate a recession until one has been going on for a while and often until the worst of it is already behind. Thus according to some estimates one will have to wait until late this year to know if there is a recession, or, the date of its beginning. All this controversy over the onset of the recession is largely beside the point, and only hides the catastrophic state of American capitalism. The current economic slump has nothing to do with an "normal business cycle" as the bourgeois pundits insist, but on the contrary is a manifestation of the convulsions of the permanent economic crisis of decadent capitalism.

American capitalism, and capitalism worldwide for that matter, has dealt with the return of the open crisis for four decades with systematic state capitalist monetary and fiscal policies that have led to the accumulation of so many absurdities that there is a real threat of economic catastrophe. As we pointed out in Internationalism 145, the real estate bubble that gave the semblance of an expanding economy for the past five years was based on easy and speculation, which have now shaken the entire capitalist system.

The Bankruptcy of Free Market Ideology

The American bourgeoisie endlessly proclaims the virtues of free market capitalism. But the present crisis exposes this claim as empty ideological posturing. An economy left to function according to the laws of the market has no place in today's capitalism, dominated by omnipresent state intervention. The last thing the capitalists would dream of today is to permit market forces to settle the current problems. There's no hesitation to call upon the Federal Reserve to manipulate interest rates, for the government to bailout Bear Stearns and other mortgage lenders, and to authorize an economic stimulus package. The bourgeoisie is implementing precisely the same easy money and cheap credit policies to prop up the economy that they have always relied upon.. The Federal Reserve has cut its interest rate benchmark 6 times since September.

For their part the White House and Congress have moved quickly as well, passing a so-called ‘economic stimulus package", in essence approving rebates for families and tax breaks for businesses and passing legislation geared towards easing the mortgage defaults epidemic and reviving the battered housing market. However given the extent of the housing and financial crisis there is even growing consideration of proposals for a massive bailout by the State of the whole housing debacle, the price tag of which would make the huge 124.6 billions bailout by the State of the Saving and loans collapse in 1990 look insignificant.

So far this traditional government medicine to jolt the economy has failed to produce any positive results. On the contrary it seems to be aggravating the illness that is trying to cure. Despite the Fed moves to easy the credit crunch, stabilize the financial sector and revive the mortgage market, credit is in short supply and expensive, the Wall Street rollercoaster ride continues unabated with wild swings and an overall downward tendency and rising mortgages rates are not helping to alleviate the housing slump. Furthermore the Fed's policy of cheap money is contributing to the decline of the dollar, every week hitting new lows against the Euro and other currencies and driving up prices of key commodities like oil. The rising prices for energy, food and other commodities at the same time of a sharply slowed down economic activity are fueling fears among the bourgeois "experts" about the prospect of a period of "stagflation" for the American economy. In any case as things are already today the rising inflation is already squeezing up consumption of people in fix income obliging the working class and other sectors of the population to tighten up their belts.

The working class

The March 7 announcement by the Labor Department that 63 000 jobs were lost nationwide during the month of February sent jitters around the bourgeois world. Surely not because of concerns for the lot of laid-off workers, but because this sharp decline in employment confirmed the economists' worst nightmares of a worsening crisis. It was the second consecutive decline in employment and the third straight drop for the private sector. However in a kind of sick joke at the expense of unemployed workers, the overall rate of unemployment declined down from 4.9 to 4.8 percent. How is this possible? The reason is nothing but a clever statistical trick used by the bourgeoisie to underreport the number of unemployed. For the government you are only unemployed if you are out of job, have actively looked for one in the last month and are ready to work at the moment of the survey. Thus the official unemployment rate significantly understates the jobs crisis. It ignores millions of Americans who, both have lost their jobs and given up on finding new ones, or who want to join the workforce but are too discouraged to try to do so because the job situation remains so bleak or simply are not willing to work for half the wage rate that they had in their recent lost job. If these "discouraged" workers were included, the unemployment rate would be significantly higher. Furthermore, the official unemployment rate does not take into account the quality of the employment. It puts part-time and full-time jobs on the same footing, and does not include millions of underemployed workers who want and seek full time employment but have had to settle for part-time work. And since 1983, it includes around two million men and women "employed" by the US military as soldiers and sailors as part of the workforce. This artificially dilutes unemployment, especially as compared to the pre-1983 when it was calculated based on the civilian workforce only.

The present economic slump is bringing an avalanche of lay-offs across all sectors of the economy, but one has to say that the now defunct housing boom was never a paradise for the working class. Income, pensions, health care, working conditions, all continued to deteriorate even while the housing market was booming. This undeniable fact led some economists to point out that this was a ‘jobless' and ‘wageless' recovery. But even this recognition understates the gravity of the situation. The reality is that the working class' working and living conditions have continued to deteriorate for the last 4 decades of open economic crisis, expansions and busts notwithstanding. As this crisis worsens during the present economic slump there is nothing in store for the working class but more misery as the bourgeoisie tries to make it bear the impact of its economic difficulties. For the working class the aggravation of the economic crisis is bringing more misery as it deals with the attacks that the bourgeoisie is launching to try to make it bear the impact of its economic difficulties. -- ES 3/23/2008

The electoral circus is clearly at the heart of the political strategy of the bourgeoisie in the current period. Revolutionaries differ from the bourgeois media pundits because our concern is not to make electoral predictions or succumb to immediatist and empiricist temptations in dissecting the minutiae of the day-to-day evolution of the electoral circus, but to understand the historic role of elections for the bourgeoisie and the strategic interests at stake for the ruling class.

Historical Perspective on Electoralism in the Workers' Movement

In the period of capitalist ascendance, when capitalism was still historically progressive, in the sense that it was capable of materially advancing the forces of production, the proletarian revolution was not yet on the historical agenda. As pointed out in the ICC's Platform, "in a period when the revolution was not yet on the agenda and when the proletariat could wrest reforms from within the system, participation in parliament allowed the class to use it to press for reforms, to use electoral campaigns as a means for propaganda and agitation for the proletarian programme, and to use parliament as a tribune for denouncing the ignominy of bourgeois politics."

However these social and political characteristics changed drastically with the onset of decadence around the time of World War I. The possibility of wresting durable social reforms from the capitalist system no longer existed, and the orientation of the workers movement toward electoralism and parliamentarism was fundamentally altered. At its Second Congress, the Communist International asserted that "the centre of gravity of political life has now been completely and finally removed beyond the confines of parliament." In decadence, the determination of political policy switched definitively into the hands of the executive branch, the permanent bureaucracy in particular, which rules in the global interest of the national capital. Each capitalist state became locked in a permanent, deadly competition with rival imperialisms as the complete division of the world market created the conditions in which economic expansion was possible only at the expense of rival powers, ultimately through world imperialist war. Despite the ideological campaigns and slogans used to mobilize popular support, the First and Second World Wars were fought in essence to re-divide the world market.

With the disappearance of the historical circumstances that made elections relevant to the workers movement, parliamentarism inevitably became an instrument of political mystification, an ideological swindle perpetuating the democratic myth and obscuring the true nature of the capitalist class dictatorship and fostering the illusion that working people can participate in the determination of governmental policies. On this level, the electoral circus represents the grand ideological maneuver of the bourgeoisie. For the greater part of the past century the American bourgeoisie has been particularly adept in controlling presidential campaigns to put in place political teams that would be capable of implementing its strategic orientations and promote the credibility of the electoral circus. The party in power in the White House was generally determined by carefully orchestrated media manipulation of the electoral process to generate the desired outcomes. Political discipline within the ruling class under which the major parties and their candidates could be relied upon to accept the division of labor determined by the dominant fractions within the ruling class further guaranteed the smooth working of the democratic mystification. Thus for example in 1960, when Kennedy achieved a narrow electoral victory over Nixon through voter fraud by the Daley political machine in Chicago, Nixon chose not to file a legal challenge to the election, but displayed his adherence to bourgeois political discipline by accepting the results in the interests of national unity.

The factors at play in determining the desired left-right political division of labor at the level of the national state may vary depending upon prevailing domestic or international circumstances. For example, when it is necessary for the bourgeoisie to initiate a new round of austerity attacks against the proletariat, it is often useful to put the right in power and the left in opposition. When it is necessary to derail a rising tide of class struggle, it may be useful to put the left in power. On the other hand, in 1992 when George W. Bush displayed ineffectiveness in responding to the imperialist challenges confronting the US after the collapse of the post World War II imperialist bloc system, the bourgeoisie opted to limit him to one term in office. Perot's third party candidacy that siphoned off votes from Bush, facilitated Clinton's victory with only 48 percent of the popular vote.

The Impact of Social Decomposition on the Electoral Circus

Since the collapse of the postwar bipolar imperialist bloc system in 1989, the US bourgeoisie has experienced increasing difficulty in effectively controlling the electoral charade. One of the central characteristics of capitalist decomposition is the rise of the tendency of "each for himself," a losing sight of more global perspectives, and a breakdown of political discipline within the bourgeoisie itself. In the presidential elections in particular this has been characterized by a trend toward "a win at any cost" mentality, a thirst for power at the expense of the long term interests of the ruling class. The 2000 electoral debacle was a glaring example of this loss of control. The ruthlessness of the Bush campaign in stealing an election in which it lost the popular vote and had to rely on the corrupt machinations of Jeb Bush's machine in highjacking the Florida vote count demonstrated the degree to which "each for himself" had put in question the capacity of the ruling class to control the political apparatus. This malfunctioning of the bourgeoisie political process led to a situation in which the Bush administration's inept imperialist policy blunders proved disastrous for the US, squandering the political capital/moral authority acquired on the international level in the aftermath of the of 9/11 and the gains made in securing working class acquiescence in rallying behind the state for war. This isolated US imperialism internationally, undermined military preparedness to respond to challenges to US hegemony in other theaters, and destroyed popular support for war, especially in the working class.

This continuing political disarray of the bourgeoisie contributed to a situation in 2004 in which the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie delayed so long in deciding on its desired political division of labor that despite the best efforts of the media to skew its coverage to favor Kerry and of the permanent bureaucracy in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community to undermine Bush's reelection possibilities with a steady flow of embarrassing and scandalous revelations, the bourgeoisie failed yet again to achieve its desired results. The 2006 midterm Congressional elections, which produced Democratic majorities in both Houses momentarily revived the electoral mystification as a means to bring about change. But the failure of the Democrats to force significant alterations in imperialist policy quickly produced a new round of popular political disenchantment.

The Political Goals of the Current Electoral Circus

There are two fundamental political objectives for American the dominant fractions of the American capitalist class in the coming presidential election:

a rectification of the Bush administration's disastrous imperialist policies in order to significantly restore American authority on the international level,

a total refurbishment of the democratic mystification, which has taken a terrible beating since the year 2000.

Rectification of Imperialist Policy.

The bourgeoisie has already made great strides in setting the stage for a full scale redressment of the catastrophic implementation of imperialist policy by the Bush administration. With virtually all of the neo-cons driven from the administration and the forced resignation of their close ally, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney is essentially the only hardcore hawk remaining in the inner circles of the administration. The permanent bureaucracy in the State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA, which represents the continuity of American imperialist policy through both Democratic and Republican administrations since the collapse of Russian imperialism in 1989, is increasingly exerting its influence in Washington. The neutralization of the Cheney-inspired campaign to stir up yet another preventative war, this time against Iran, is testimony to the power of this permanent bureaucracy. Career foreign service officials opposed the war plans as yet another irrational policy that would further isolate US imperialism on the international level. Military leaders were painfully aware that American forces are already stretched way too thin to sustain a third front in yet another theatre. And the intelligence bureaucracy, sick and tired of having its intelligence gathering manipulated and twisted by Cheney and the neo-cons with disastrous consequences, gave the administration's bellicose Iran policy the kiss of death by releasing its National Intelligence Estimate findings that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program over three years ago, thus eliminating the rationale of the Bush administration's bellicose policy.

This sets the stage for an even more far reaching realignment of imperialist policy. Whoever wins the White House in November, the struggle of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie to pursue a more sophisticated, more "multilateral" imperialist policy, that will lessen American imperialism's growing isolation and reestablish its authority on the international level seems to be making significant headway. Even McCain, who supported Bush's ‘troop surge" last year and still defends the invasion of Iraq, is committed to more multilateral policies and a longer term vision of imperialist military planning.

Refurbishing the Democratic Mystification.

Initially it seemed that the 2006 election constituted a reinvigoration of an electoral mystification that had been badly tarnished by both the stolen presidential election of 2000 and the failure of the American ruling class to accomplish its belated 2004 consensus on the need to elect John Kerry president. By contrast, the 2006 election which put the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, was portrayed in the capitalist media and by prominent politicians in both major parties, as an expression of the political will of the American people for an end to the war in Iraq, for a change in political direction at the national level. Politicians and political pundits alike threw around phrases like "a swing in the political pendulum," and a "tremendous blow to the Republican party," and there was growing acceptance of the notion that the Republicans were destined to take up the role of political opposition in the future political division of labor. For a while it truly seemed like the sorely eroded public confidence in the electoral process had been restored. But this proved to be short lived as the failure of the Democrats to overcome the Bush administration's continued resistance to end the war in Iraq revived skepticism about the effectiveness of electoralism as a means of expressing the "popular will." Public opinion polls showed the approval ratings of both Bush and Congress hovering at record low levels, approaching 29%. The electorate was just as fed up with the Democrats as they were with the Republicans.

The bourgeoisie desperately needs the 2008 election to revive its central ideological swindle. Having squandered the fruit of its 2006 election so quickly and given the persistent difficulty of the bourgeoisie's dominant fractions to control the electoral process in the context of worsening social decomposition, it is not clear whether the ruling class will be successful in reinvigorating the democratic mystification. Having started out riding a tidal wave of opposition to the war in Iraq, the remaining Democratic presidential candidates now openly acknowledge that an early troop withdrawal is impossible and predict that troops will have to remain in Iraq for quite some time. Even Obama, the most "anti-war" of the candidates, promises a "responsible," "orderly" withdrawal that might take two years or more to complete.

In recent weeks we have once again seen the impact of decomposition on the election, the same win at any cost ruthlessness that characterized the stolen election of 2000, in Hillary Clinton's destructive "Tonya Harding" strategy which puts at risk the bourgeoisie's capacity to regain control over the electoral process. While it is not our concern to predict the election results, it is clear that the bourgeoisie could live with the any of the three remaining candidates, particularly in regard to imperialist policy. However in regard to resuscitation of the electoral mystification, Obama best serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. His charismatic, but largely vacuous, appeals for change have triggered a rarely seen enthusiasm among young generations of voters, who have been largely apathetic to the bourgeoisie political process, drawing them into electoral politics in large numbers for the first time in many years. This is a tremendous plus for the bourgeoisie and has led to unprecedented numbers of voters participating in the primaries and caucuses this winter. Bourgeois political pundits have promoted the Obama phenomenon as "a social movement," that has tapped the wellsprings of "hope" and a desire for change. To the contrary, what we are witnessing is not a social movement, but an extremely successful ideological campaign, reviving the electoral mystification.

Like everything the bourgeoisie does to address its problems in the period of decomposition, the Obama candidacy ultimately risks aggravating the very problems that it's designed to redress. If he fails to gain the nomination or if he gains the nomination and loses the general election, disillusionment sets in with millions of young people. If he gains the nomination and wins the election, it will be impossible for him to deliver any significant change, which would also give rise to widespread disillusionment.

In the months ahead, as the electoral circus gears up even more, it will be critical for revolutionaries to expose this ideological swindle for what it is, and to stress the need for the working class to defend its interests on its own terrain, at the point of production and in the streets. - J. Grevin 04/13/2008

There are so many things that are going wrong in today's world -- wars without end that are killing and displacing millions around the world; health epidemics that condemn millions to early deaths and suffering; famines; homelessness; degradation of the environment that is menace the future of all life on earth; growing pauperization of the working masses of the world.... the list could go on and on. And there is no safe haven.

The metropoles of capitalism and the ever underachieving undeveloped countries, where the majority of the world population lives, are all in the same sinking boat. The talking-heads for capitalism have a thousand-and-one reasons for this situation, none of which is close to the truth. The fact is that in four decades of open economic crisis capitalism has driven the whole of humanity to the edge of a precipice. Society, instead of being in control of its own destiny, seems to be more and more the helpless victim of ruthless social, economic and natural forces that appear to have a life of their own. Left to its own devices decadent capitalism will in the end destroy humanity.

It is against this dramatic background that the international struggle of the working class, the only force in present society that can offer an alternative to capitalism's madness, takes on all its historic importance. It is in this context that we have to situate our balance of the present stage of the working class struggle.

An international upsurge of class struggle

Ever since the first signs of the return of the open economic crisis of capitalism 40 years ago, the world working class put the bourgeoisie on notice about its undiminished historic importance, belying the modernist propaganda about the disappearance of the proletariat. Once again the historic class confrontation between the bourgeoisie, representative of decadent capitalism, and the proletariat, its potential gravedigger, came to the center of the social situation. Through successive international waves of struggles, starting with the great mobilization of workers and students in France in 1968, and up to the late 1980's, the world proletariat confronted in the class struggle capitalism's attempts to make workers bear the brunt of its deepening economic crisis. Many hard lessons about the working class methods of struggle, the bourgeois nature of the unions, and the traps of bourgeois democracy were learned in these struggles. This dynamic came to an end with the sudden collapse of Stalinism at the end of 1989 and beginning of the 1990's.
The world bourgeoisie used this collapse to convince workers about the futility of hoping for a different world beyond profit driven capitalism. Thanks to years in which the working class had been made to believe that Stalinism=communism, this campaign delivered a setback both at the level of combativeness and consciousness in the workers ,sending the class struggle into a deep reflux for most of the decade of the 90's.

As we have pointed out in the press of the ICC, in the last few years this reflux has come to an end. At the international level, in the last five years, there has been an upsurge of the class struggle by the world proletariat involving all sectors in the developed and underdeveloped countries of capitalism. Combativeness and, above all, consciousness are once again in the rise in the class.

What are the general characteristics of this phase of the class struggle?

As highlighted in the resolution on the international situation adopted by the ICC's 17th Congress in May 2007 and confirmed by numerous recent struggles throughout the world the general characteristics of these recent class struggles are:

"...they are more and more incorporating the question of solidarity. This is vitally important because it constitutes par excellence the antidote to the "every man for himself" attitude typical of social decomposition, and above all because it is at the heart of the world proletariat's capacity not only to develop its present struggles but also to overthrow capitalism."

The struggles express a disillusionment in the future that capitalism offers us: "nearly four decades of open crisis and attacks on working class living conditions, notably the rise of unemployment and precarious work, have swept aside illusions that ‘tomorrow things will be better': the older generations of workers as well as the new ones are much more conscious of the fact that ‘tomorrow things will be even worse.'"

"Today it is not the possibility of revolution which is the main food for the process of reflection but, in view of the catastrophic perspectives which capitalism has in store for us, its necessity.''

"In 1968, the movement of the students and the movement of the workers, while succeeding each other in time, and while they had sympathy for each other, expressed two different realities with regard to capitalism's entry into its open crisis: for the students, a revolt of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie faced with the perspective of a deterioration of its status in society; for the workers, an economic struggle against the beginning of the degradation of their living standards. In 2006, the movement of the students was a movement of the working class."

True, many of the present struggles are still taking place under the suffocating stronghold of the unions and are often derailed into dead-ends, but as shown during the students struggle in France in spring of 2006, there is also an incipient tendency for the class to struggle to use its own methods, taking control collectively of its own movement. This was the sense of the mass assemblies, open to the participation of all members of the class, that took place during the student movements in France in Spring 2006 and autumn 2007, and also during the struggle of metal workers at Vigo Spain in May 2006.

Where is the working class struggle in the US?

Workers in the US, faced with tremendous attacks on their working and living conditions by capitalism's deepening economic crisis, have also returned to the path of the struggle, leaving behind the period of disorientation that characterized the 1990's. As we have shown in our press the working class in this country has been a full participant in the present upsurge on the international class struggle, showing both the strengths and weaknesses of this movement.

In the December holiday season of 2005 over 34, 000 NYC transit workers --subway and buses- went on strike effectively paralyzing New York City for 3 days. For the bourgeoisie this movement was the illegal act of selfish vandals - in ‘democratic' America most public workers cannot legally strike. For the working class this was the clear beginning of a new moment in the confrontation with capital. This movement had at its heart the same question of solidarity that we have seen in many other struggles throughout the world. Workers refused to be accomplices in the attempt of the State to create a new pension tier affecting future new hires, to sell out the ‘unborn" as the main slogan of the movement said. This solidarity with the new workers generation, an expression of a growing consciousness of class identity, was echoed by the enormous sympathy expressed by working population of the city with the struggle, despite the attempts of the city officials to turn the population against the striking workers.

However the transit workers strike was not an isolated incident but rather the clearest manifestation of a tendency of the class to come back to the path of the struggle as seen in the grocery workers struggle in California in 2004 and the struggles at Boeing, North West Airlines and Philadelphia transit workers in 2005. This same tendency to return to the path of the struggle continued in 2006, as expressed in particular by the two-week teachers wildcat strike in Detroit in September, and the walkout by more than 12,000 workers at 16 Goodyear Tire & Rubber plants in the US and Canada on October of the same year.

In the last few months of 2007, as we detailed in the last issue of Internationalism, there were a number of simultaneous strikes and struggles, a phenomenon we haven't seen in quite a while. This included a number of official union strikes, such as the strike in New York City by mini-bus drivers who transport people with disabilities, Broadway theater stagehands, and film and TV writers, and an unofficial strike by young "free-lance" workers a MTV in New York. This latter group, many in their 20's and 30's, non-unionized, leading a precarious worklife as more or less permanent temporary workers with little or no health care benefits and relatively low wages, echoed the struggles of the French student movement against the CPE in 2006 in their attempts to self organize, use innovative methods to communicate, including the use of e-mail and websites, and organize street demonstrators. Their slogan "there are too many of us to ignore" reflected a recognition of the need for solidarity and the maxim that in unity there is strength.

More recently there have been two other major strikes in the auto industry involving several thousand workers in a number of states in which workers have shown enormous courage, but which seemed to be under total control of the UAW union honchos. In February 1 2,600 workers at Volvo Trucks North America in Dublin, Virginia, went on strike after the company refused to renew the current contract, presumably in an attempt to force its workers to accept the ‘industry standards' of cutbacks set by the ‘big three' automakers in last year's contract negotiations and union-controlled strikes at GM and Chrysler. February 25, 3,600 workers went on strike at American Axle and Manufacturing Holdings Inc. American Axle has five plants in Michigan and New York that produce parts for GM and others automakers. American Axe is demanding wage reductions of up to $14 an hour, as well as elimination of future retiree and pension benefits. Already in 2004 the UAW agreed to lower the wages for starting workers at American Axle after a one-day strike. A union boss at this company in an amazing confession of the bourgeois nature of these organizations said: "the UAW has a proven record of working with companies to improve their competitive position and secure jobs." No comment necessary.

The bourgeoise is not resting on its laurels

The dominant class has been able to respond to the present upsurge of the class struggle at different levels. After their initial surprise at the time of the NYC transit strike, the bourgeoisie's main focus has been to derail any efforts by the working class in drawing the real lessons of this movement. Thus the main strengths of the strike, the combativeness of these workers that went in strike in defiance of bourgeois legality, their class consciousness and deep sense of solidarity with their class brothers, were turned into a "defeated" strike that ended with workers accepting a worse deal -an across the board establishment of health insurance contributions- than the main reason of the movement --a new more precarious pension system for future workers.- The fallacy of this conclusion is that after the transit strike the local bourgeoisie recognized that its attempt to use the transit workers to set a bargaining pattern had failed and took the proposal for the same new pension system off the table in negotiations with other city workers. Furthermore in an attempt to avoid any contagion from the transit strike to other city workers upcoming contracts were negotiated with unusual speed and without the usual cutbacks.

Another central weapon of the bourgeoisie against the present upsurge of the class struggle has been the use of the democratic mystification, the myth that workers can influence at the ballot box their present fate and the future of society. For nearly three years now, there has been a barrage of intensive political campaigns whipped up by the media (see the article on the election campaign elsewhere in this issue Although it is difficult to quantify, there is no denying that this electoral campaigns have had a negative effect in the working class, particularly at the level of strengthening the democratic mystification. In particular the Obama campaign has been able to draw a lot of attention from the young generation of workers, who are so important to the future of the class struggle. What is clear is that despite this toxic effect of bourgeois electoral campaigns, workers have still been struggling on their own terrain as shown by the mobilizations that we described above.

Also with the excuse of the ‘terrorist' boogey man the dominant class has been strengthening its apparatus of repression creating a social ambience of an omnipresent political persecution, a fear of not saying the ‘wrong' word, or writing it for that matter. Although for the working class at large the present measures of repression are mostly ‘preemptive', direct repression for immigrant workers - legal and illegal-

are already very real. The press is filled with news about the official abuse of these workers by the State repressive apparatus. The question of immigration is being use as always to create divisions within the working class: to play immigrant against native workers, legal against illegal.

However in the ‘field' the most trusted and skillful representatives of capitalism in the struggle against the working class are the Unions and their twin brothers the Left and leftist organizations that use a working class-sounding language to sabotage the workers struggle from within. All the unions have been working hard, helping capitalism manage the crisis on the workers backs, negotiating lay-offs and wage and benefit cuts. And during strikes they have done their utmost to keep struggle workers in isolation, sabotaging solidarity and leading them into dead ends. For their part the leftist -trotskyst, maoist, Marxist-Leninist.... are doing their job in trying to block the development of working class consciousness, defending the unions as working class organizations and spreading the bourgeois ideologies of nationalism and interclasism.

Conclusion

By the bourgeoisie's own accounts the worst of its present economic difficulties are still to come. As the current crisis deepens the working class will face a barrage of attacks, the violence of which it has not seen in the recent past. If the promises of the present upsurge of the class struggle come to fruition will, we will also see an unprecedented level of mobilizations in which the historical stakes of the present will come to the forefront.

The bourgeoisie has no solution to the crisis and can only offer to humanity a future of increasing barbarity. The key to overcoming the present state of society rests with the working class, it is the only force that can through its worldwide revolution bring about a world community based in human needs and solidarity. The intervention of revolutionaries is the class struggle is an essential part of this perspective.

-- Edo Smith 4/12/2008

For the past seven years the American ruling class has moved relentlessly and forcefully to use the events of 9/ll as the pretext for pushing through a tremendous reinforcement of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. While ostensibly designed as a means to combat the “terrorist” threat from Islamist fundamentalism, the strengthening of the repressive apparatus is a means that the state will not hesitate to use against any threat to its dominance, including especially the working class and its revolutionary movement. Using the semi-hysteria created by 9/ll is a cynical maneuver to undo the post-Watergate reform measures that had been designed to prevent a recurrence of the Nixon administration abuses, in which the repressive apparatus was used against members of the ruling class itself.

The commitment to strengthen repression is not simply the preoccupation of the rightwing, but a general policy orientation of the dominant fractions of the American bourgeoisie, which actually predates 9/11, and that this policy has already tangibly impact on daily life in the U.S. These measures range from the U.S.A. Patriot Act, to the abuse of illegal wiretapping, to development of terrorist watchlists (which now include the names of 917,000 people), to the long list of abuses of the newly granted powers, and the use of new technologies to monitor the everyday activities of citizens.

The U.S.A. Patriotic Act was passed overwhelmingly within a few weeks of 9/ll without any public hearings, without any expert testimony, without hardly an opportunity to read the legislation. That this rush to erode traditional civil liberties was not simply the result of legislative hysteria, was amply demonstrated in five years later when the law was reauthorized with only the most minor alterations, despite widespread criticism of the original provisions. Likewise, there has been no difficulty in securing bipartisan support for the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay which fly in the face of international law, or for wireless wiretaps and surveillance by the National Security Administration (Bush’s dispute with Democrats over immunity for telecommunication companies that cooperated in illegal wiretaps before the authorizing legislation is in fact a secondary matter).

The strengthening of the repressive apparatus predates 9/11, which only provided a convenient pretext to accelerate the process. So for example, the Clinton administration provided funding in the 1990s to vastly expand police forces across the country and increased the number of federal crimes that were punishable by the death penalty. Indeed some bourgeois observers noted that Clinton, despite his “liberal” image, had done more to expand the death penalty than Ronald Reagan. The strengthening of the police forces and their closer integration with federal authorities, increases monitoring of various protest movements, as could be seen in the infiltration of groups that protested at the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City. So-called “community relations” or “community affairs” units work with demonstration leaders to control protests and keep them under control—a lesson the bourgeoisie learned from the unrest of the 1960s. Recent reports demonstrate that the U.S. has more of its adult population in prison, both in terms of absolute numbers and percentage of adult population than any other country in the world for which reliable statistics are available. According to research generated by the Pew Center on the States, more than $44 billion was spent on prisons last year. Vermont, Connecticut, Deleware, Michigan and Oregon spent as much or more on keeping people in prison than they did on financing public higher education. One in 99 American adults is in jail. Among black males, between 20 and 34 years of age, one in 9 is serving time in prison. For Hispanics, 1 in 36 male adults is behind bars. And all of this occurs at a time when the bourgeoisie brags that crime is declining.

For the working class, the capitalist state is the enemy. The destruction of the capitalist state and its replacement by the power of the workers councils is the central political goal of the workers revolution. It is only a matter of time before the strengthening of the repressive apparatus will be used against the working class struggle. No propaganda campaign about the threat of mindless terrorism can be allowed to hide the fact that it is the revolutionary proletariat that is the real target of this campaign. -- JG 4/12/2008

Anyone who has followed the ICC press in the last couple of years has certainly noticed the articles where we saluted the emergence of a new militants in the working class searching for political understanding and willing to take militant action to defend proletarian interests. This included articles assessing the mobilization of working class students in France in 2006 and the participation of new groups in the internationalist milieu at the 17th Congress of the ICC, to which four groups were invited, but only three were able to attend (the other couldn't participate because of visa problems). The participation of these groups in the work of the ICC reflects the fact that we have entered a new period in the development of the class struggle, both at the levels of combativeness and consciousness, which has broken with almost 15 years of retreat following the collapse of the Stalinist bloc and the confusions that event had sown, and the great effort by the ICC to open up to the new generation in the spirit of fraternal debate.

Internationalism itself, the ICC section in the US, has just completed its yearly territorial conference, at which some close contacts participated, along with delegates from sections of the ICC in Europe and Latin America. Far from representing the final product of a long work, this participation is just the beginning of a promising perspective for growing involvement of the new generation of internationalist comrades at our territorial conferences in the future. Their presence and contributions have inspired the section to pursue the work of opening the debates to our contacts and sympathizers, have instilled greater confidence among the comrades, and have enriched us with the learning experience of how to fruitfully and fraternally conduct debates.

The importance of the contacts' presence

The significance of the participation of these comrades in an internal moment in the life of the ICC cannot be overstated. Today's recovery of class combat is comparable to that of 1968. In both instances we see a deep reflection on the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, on the dead-end of this agonizing system, and a resurgence of elements attracted by left communist positions. In both instances, there is a break with periods of retreat in combativeness and consciousness: 1968 broke with the counter-revolution which had lasted around fifty years following the crushing of the revolutionary wave that began in 1917. Today, the class is leaving behind the retreat it suffered after the collapse of the Stalinist bloc. The presence of our contacts at the conference was really just the tip of the iceberg of this profound maturation. Because a territorial conference -which every section of the ICC holds regularly-- is a vital moment in the life of the ICC as a whole, this truly unprecedented event for Internationalism will contribute to the strengthening and expansion of the ICC presence in the US. We thus anticipate more and better for the future.

The discussions

Preparing for the conference was as intense as it was politically invigorating, full of anticipation and questions regarding how to conduct an internal event in which non-members were to participate. The goal was to give the US section a clear orientation for its activities and intervention for the year to come. However, the presence of our contacts demanded that we assured their complete inscription in the debates, that their contribution would, in effect, help the section flesh out these orientations. To this end, the various reports were written in advance of the conference date and given to the participants, as well as several others who were ultimately unable to attend. This issue of Internationalism includes articles based on the reports and discussions at the conference (election campaign, economy, class struggle, repression). Readers will appreciate the depth of the analyses, so this report will not go into the details of those reports and discussions. Instead, we would like to make a balance of how the discussions went in order to learn and advance in the future, when we will have more and more comrades participating in our conferences.

Of the various discussions held -on the aspects of the national situation in the US -- the economic crisis, the class struggle, and the political strategy of the bourgeoisie, and the culture of debate - the latter was the one that drew the most comments and reflections by our contacts. We premised it by pointing out that the culture of debate and class consciousness are not the monopoly of any revolutionary organization, but belong to the proletariat as a whole. The class learns its historical lessons and pushes its consciousness forward through debate, as the experience of the general assemblies-the soviets-have demonstrated historically. Debate is a fundamental aspect of political development. In fact, it politicizes. We see the coming to consciousness as a process that goes from confusion to questioning to making mistakes to clarification through the widest possible collective debate conducted fraternally, while maintaining the unity of the organization. It is crucial that revolutionaries deepen on this question in the context of the present aggravation of the crisis, the consequent resurgence of class struggle, and the increasingly clear perspective that capitalism offers no future. The ICC has a tremendously important role to play, but we don't have all the answers. In the words of one of the contacts, "The development of ideas is facilitated by debate and by questions and criticisms posed with respect between the debaters that leads to clarification. Also, it can lead to a new formulation, combining elements within the comrades, and can lead to a new understanding, which could deepen clarification. This could deepen the discussion and clarity becomes more comprehensive within the context of sincere commitment to clarification."

The report on the economic crisis was welcomed with soberness. It was pointed out that the present recession reveals the vulnerability of a system that relies more and more on credit and massive state intervention to stave off economic disaster. While there was caution as to the use of the concept of ‘sudden collapse' and even "catastrophe", the question was raised as to how much and what margin of maneuver the bourgeoisie will be left with. The economic crisis and its plethora of attacks on pensions, jobs, working conditions, wages, and health benefits, is inevitably linked to the resurgence of the class struggle, because it lays bare the dead end of capitalism. Of course, this is what the bourgeoisie itself is watching, in the context of struggles that more and more are posing the question of solidarity and that show similar dynamic internationally. The beefing up of the bourgeoisie's repressive apparatus is seen as a response to the threat of future upsurges of class struggle. It is also the way for the bourgeoisie to face the manifestations of decomposition, such as the threat of massive immigration, but also terrorism.

As to the political strategy of the bourgeoisie, it was pointed out that there is at present quite enough homogeneity within the ruling class regarding the necessity to rectify imperialist policy to enable the US to intervene militarily in other theaters of operations without any precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, that any of the remaining three major candidates would be viable for the next term in power. In terms of which candidate can best revitalize the democratic mystification, badly in need of a face-lift, the answer was, quite obviously, Obama.

Finally, on imperialism, we acknowledge the impasse of the ruling class, lasting already several years, not on which strategy overall, but on how to implement it. Further, we reaffirmed that the more force the US uses to protect the vestiges of its hegemonic status, the more this results in a further decline of its legitimacy as a world power.

What is the balance sheet for the conference?

The conference was a tremendous learning experience on how to debate and address the points of the discussions. A conference at which contacts participate requires a special level of preparation, a fine tuning of how to pose questions so that the debates can go as deep as possible and an ability to listen for the divergences, hesitations, confusions, the real questioning that goes on within the class, and which our contacts themselves express.

In the words of one of the contacts, "I didn't think depth was reached on some issues, but there was a comprehensive view of the bourgeoisie's strategy and the culture of debate. It certainly opens us up to a deeper analysis on this. I like the way the meetings were held because everyone had a chance to speak and say their ideas, much more valuable than other left meetings that I have gone to. For example, in the trotskyist organizations I had the freedom to ask questions and then they jumped on me when I said something about nationalization that they didn't like. I am glad I came and met you folks and hope we can get together again."

Another comrade commented, "The afternoon started for me with a welcome and I want to say thank you for the invitation. I liked the diversification in the discussion, the different texts, there was something for everybody. I am more familiar today with the conditions of the world...something for the experienced and those less experienced. You made me aware of stuff that I don't think other organizations would share. Giving us the texts in advance was very valuable so I didn't come in here cold. I am aware of being a worker today, not just an American, or whatever brand of nationality or ethnicity or race, but a worker which is much bigger than the other categories. The understanding of consciousness is key. I would have liked to see younger people here in the future. I came in at a 3 and I'm leaving at an 8." For comrades of Internationalism, the conference marks a watershed moment in the effort to open to the fast growing internationalist milieu that surrounds us and which portends great possibilities for the left communist workers movement in the US. Ana, 4/11/08

Dear Internationalism,

I've read your series on how decadence affects capitalism in the International Review. Even though the union movement is portrayed as being progressive in the 1920's and 30's, it had moved away from being a worker's movement and became a hindrance on the working class. In the US, the situation was different in that the industrial unions sprang up in the 1920's and 30's and were quite militant causing wildcat strikes and sit-ins in the plants -- especially in the 30's. Large gains were won in wages, work hours and medical care. Only after the middle 30's did the unions move away from militancy and become supporters of FDR's New Deal and, then, support for the coming imperialist war. The unions after WWII never moved back to militancy. Instead they backed reformist bourgeois liberals who granted concessions while the Soviet Union existed. The workers themselves didn't show militancy but followed the unions' betraying leadership. No significant sector of the union movement emerged to challenge union officialdom and this speaks of a deep moral chasm in the union's middle strata...

SH, Jan. 08

Our reply

Dear SH

We have discussed your recent message concerning decadence and its impact on the class struggle. We want to salute your seriousness and willingness to share your reflections. In this communication, we would like to expand a bit on why we think unions were integrated into American state capitalism at the time of the First World War, with global capitalism's entry into its decadent phase. Capitalism is a global economic system, and the qualitative change in the capitalist system from its ascendant to its decadent period occurs on a global, international level, not a country by country basis. Certainly, there may be specificities in how global tendencies and processes play themselves out in particular countries, but this in no way should imply that there was any significant difference in the situation in the US compared to other countries.

In this context, the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and industrial unions in the US was NOT an expression of working class militancy, but on the contrary a response by state capitalism to counteract that militancy. Despite the mythology of the CIO's creation propagated by Stalinist and Trotskyist propaganda, the successful organization of industrial unions in the 1930's in the mass production industries was imposed by American capitalism as a means to control, discipline, and eventually mobilize the working class for imperialist slaughter in World War II.

We published a lengthy article in Internationalism No. 12 in 1977, "The Formation of the CIO : Triumph of the Bourgeoisie," which refuted Art Preis' "Labor's Giant Step," which painted a glowing picture of the CIO from a Trotskyist perspective. We think the analysis and evidence developed in that article is pertinent to your further reflection on the unions and decadence. To highlight some central points:

1).- As in other industrialized countries, World War I marked the integration of the unions into the state apparatus, with their participation in the War Industries Board, which was charged with mobilizing American industry for the war. Then serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, during WW I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked closely with and appreciated the effectiveness of the WIB, with the unions as full partners and participants, in exerting centralized state control over the economy. In addition a number of other prominent capitalists who participated in the statification of the economy during the war, recognized the benefits that industrial unions could render to American capital, especially in industrial mobilization for war.

2).- While the state capitalist measures introduced during WW I were largely dismantled after the war during the 1920's, not to be reintroduced until the after the onset of the Great Depression and the New Deal program introduced by FDR in 1933, the rise of Fordism and mass production industries during the 1920's increasingly demonstrated the anachronistic nature of the traditional AFL craft unions, as a means for effectively controlling the working class. Gerard Swope, president of General Electric, who had been involved in the work of the WIB during WW I, "vainly tried to convince William Green, the president of the AFL, to form a nation-wide industrial union of electrical workers. For Swope, industrial efficiency would be ‘intolerably handicapped if the bulk of our employees were organized into different and often competing craft unions'" (Internationalism No.12, p3). From the union side, Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, one of the only industrial unions within the AFL, criticized narrow craft unionism because "it permits of no responsibility between labor and management," and undercut the ability to provide for stable and responsible management of large scale industry. In essence, both Swope and Hillman saw that big capital and the state needed to deal with one bargaining agent in each industry to guarantee efficiency and labor discipline. Industrial unionism in decadence was no threat to capitalism, but a necessary tool.

3) -The impotence of organized labor, as personified by the AFL, to control and discipline the American working class was demonstrated during the 1920's and early 30's, where the number of strikes by non-unionized workers as compared to union-called strikes, grew continuously until by the early 30's the majority of strikes in the US were wildcats outside union control - hence, outside state control.

4).- As early as 1933, the incoming FDR administration recognized the necessity to prepare for eventual war with German imperialism and understood that the coming inter-imperialist war required the creation of industrial unions to control and mobilize the masses of unorganized unskilled and semi-skilled workers. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933, a key element in FDR's New Deal, granted workers "the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing," laying the framework for the organization of industrial unions. The National Recovery Administration, which presided over state centralization of the depression-ridden economy openly encouraged unionization. The newly created National Labor Board (NLB) decreed that the union receiving a majority of votes in a plant would have exclusive bargaining rights for all employees in the plant, a practice that differs from many European nations, where a single plant may have workers belong to different unions affiliated with the CP, the SP or and centrist political party. US capitalism was committed to centralized control over its workforce in key industries. While unionization of mass production industries had the support of the state, and "enlightened" members of the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, it was opposed by small and medium sized industrialists organized in the American Manufacturers, as well as recalcitrant big capitalists like Henry Ford (Ford) and Tom Girdler (Republic Steel). . In any case, the AFL proved indifferent and unwilling to undertake organization of unskilled workers.

5).- The strike wave of 1934, as increasing numbers of workers rebelled against the conditions of hardship, convinced the FDR administration that it couldn't rely on the AFL to organize the working class. The Wagner Act gave strong enforcement powers to the newly created National Labor Relations Board to override the resistance of backward members of the bourgeoisie and to accelerate the efforts of the Congress of Industrial Organizations to organize the mass production industries. The CIO and state leadership was crystal clear on its role in service of capitalism. CIO President John L. Lewis, from the Miners, in reference to the spontaneous eruption of class struggle and strikes, said, "it is conceivable that if this dangerous state of affairs is allowed to continue there will not only be ‘class-consciousness' but revolution as well. But it can be avoided. The employers aren't doing much to avoid it. The United Mine Workers are doing everything in their power to make the system work and thereby avoid it." The head of the NLRB, Lloyd K. Garrison, said "I regard organized labor in this country as our chief bulwark against communism and other revolutionary movements." Len De Caux, editor of the CIO Union News Service, said, "When collective bargaining is fully accepted, union recognition accorded and an agreement reached, CIO unionists accept full responsibility for carrying out their side of it in a disciplined fashion, and oppose sit-downs or any other strike action while it is in force."

6).- Reflecting the anger and discontent of the workers, it is true that militant strikes erupted in many industries during the CIO unionizing drives, including the sit-downs at General Motors in 1936-37, which involved 136,000 workers in 17 plants, where strikers demanded abolition of piece work payment schemes, a thirty hour week/six hour work day, premium pay for overtime, reinstatement of fired workers, and worker control of production line speed. However the militancy of the workers should not be confused with the attitude of the CIO unions. For instance, while the plants remained under worker control, the union bureaucracy paid lip service to the workers' demands and concentrated on union recognition as their central concern. Forced by the government pressure to end the strike, GM agreed to bargain with the United Auto Workers for the next six months in exchange for an end to the factory occupations. In the end, the union surrendered on the central workers' demands but won union recognition, which was the pattern throughout the CIO's organizing campaigns. --Internationalism 02/1/2008

 

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/313/may-68 [15]

Since the collapse of the housing bubble at the beginning of 2007 economists and government representatives have been betting on the odds of a recession in the US economy. Currently we are mid-way through 2008 and still the ‘experts' have not made up their minds about its likelihood. Meanwhile the signs of crisis are everywhere: the mortgage debacle continues unabated, driving down house prices and leaving in its wake a wave of foreclosure, company bankruptcies and shaking to its core the entire financial system, where profits have been going up in smoke as fast as they were created in the boom days of the real estate market. Furthermore, the economic troubles are not limited solely to the industries related to the housing market. The same devastating picture can be seen in the airlines and automobile industries for example, which in fact collapsed well before the bursting of the real estate bubble.

The US government's response to the unfolding crisis has been yet again more of the same monetary tricks that it's used to manage its chronically sick economy every time it has shown signs of a sudden decline: in essence pumping huge amounts of cheap money into the economy in the hope that this will stimulate demand and keep the consumers partying on. For instance, since last September the Federal Reserve has lowered its basic interest rate 7 times and has kept a semblance of order in the financial system through a constant flow of cheap money. However, even though government policies in the short term have saved the economy from a total collapse there seems to be a very high price to pay in store (no pun intended!) One of the main consequences of the Fed's policy of cheap money is to have driven down the value of the dollar, which has set record lows against the Euro and other major currencies, thus pushing up the price of commodities in the world market, which are priced in dollars. In other words, the Fed's policy has sharply increased inflationary pressures around the world.

Faced with the obvious fact of rising prices, the US government has acknowledged in recent weeks that inflation is escalating. The latest government data shows that in May inflation in the US is running at a yearly rate of 4.2%.  In one of his latest public speeches Mr. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has hinted that - given present inflationary trends - the Fed will not lower interest rates any more in the immediate future. Therefore the Fed seems to be changing gears and making the fight against inflation its main priority, putting the attempts to jump start the economy on the backburner.

To be sure, inflation has surged in the US recently and no worker would need bourgeois economic ‘specialists' to tell them this, as the working class has been feeling the pinch of higher prices in everything from food to shelter, heating fuels and gasoline. If the government inflation estimate seems suspiciously low it's because it has a conscious policy of underestimating inflation, just as the bourgeoisie has a conscious policy of understating the rate of unemployment. For the last three decades, using statistical gimmicks on the way the CPI (consumer price index) is calculated, the US bourgeoisie has managed to showcase a relatively low rate of inflation compared with the double digits hyper-inflation of the 1970's. Some of these statistical tricks deserve to be mentioned. Until 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured housing inflation by looking at what it cost to buy and own homes, considering factors like house prices, mortgage interest costs and property taxes. Based on some dubious reasoning, this component of the CPI disappeared and was replaced by a so-called "owner's equivalent rent" instead of the real cost of home ownership. It has been calculated that this manipulation alone has served to understate inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points.  In the 1990's the CPI was subject to three other downward adjustments. Firstly, ‘product substitution': very conveniently, if a product (say high quality meat) gets too expensive, it is moved out of the CPI, because people are assumed to shift to a cheaper substitute, say hamburger. Secondly, ‘geometric weighting': goods and services for which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting because of a presumed reduction in consumption. Thirdly, something called ‘hedonic adjustment', which pretends to measure consumer satisfaction due to improvements to products and services.

In August 1971, when inflation in the US reached 4%, it was considered a national crisis and the Nixon administration imposed price and wage controls. Today a 4.2 % inflation rate is merely sounding some alarm bells. What's worse, according to non-government calculations, this supposed 4% inflation rate seems to be in reality much closer to a 7 to 10 percent yearly rate, as it has been on average since 1980 if one ignores the government manipulation of CPI statistics.

Obviously the bourgeoisie doesn't go to all this trouble to manipulate the real rate of inflation just for the sake of it. In addition to its value as an ideological mystification - presenting capitalism as being in much better shape than it really is - there is a very practical reason behind it. Since CPI calculations are used to measure social security benefits (and other state entitlement programs) as well as pension, salary and benefit increases, its downward estimation means that the worse effects of the chronic crisis of the system are passed on directly to the working class. In fact, inflation and especially its official underestimation have contributed greatly to the pauperization of the working class in the last forty years of open economic crisis. For instance, by some calculations if one were to roll back changes made to the CPI calculations since the Carter years, Social Security checks would be 70% greater than they currently are!

The specter of inflation haunts the world

Evidently the recent spike on inflation is not just a US phenomenon. Raw material prices have been on an upward spiral for most of this decade, and since 2007 global food and energy prices have been rapidly increasing. The international market price of wheat doubled from February 2007 to February 2008. Rice prices also reached ten years high, while in some parts of the world milk and meat prices have more than doubled. Also, soy and corn prices have increased dramatically. Finally, the price of oil has skyrocketed, doubling in the last year.

Here are some examples of the developing inflation around the world. In May of this year, the Euro zone inflation rate was reported at 3.7%, up from 3.3% and the highest since modern records began in the mid-1990s. Now the UK has reported its own record-breaking 3.3%, up from 3% the previous month, when just last January the annual rate was as low as 2.2%. Not even China, often cited as a showcase of capitalist dynamism and health, has been spared. The jump in China's inflation rate to a 12-year high of 8.7% last February sent chills around the world. In the last year food prices jumped in China by 23%, with vegetable prices 46% higher and pork a dramatic 63%.

Moreover, what has cause increased worry in capitalist circles is the fact that this acceleration of inflation is happening at the same time that the system is suffering a generalized slowdown spearheaded by the developing convulsions of the US economy.  The word "stagflation" is more and more on the lips of the economic ‘specialists.' What they are not saying is that in the last 40 years of growing capitalist economic crisis, through cycles of bubbles and busts, inflation has been a permanent phenomenon of world-wide capitalism.  In fact one of the main goals of the economic policies of the government central banks in every nation is to keep inflation pressures in check. However, government policies not withstanding, inflation has spiked out of control quite often. During the ‘70s, following on the collapse of the Breton Woods Accord in 1971, inflation broke loose internationally, reaching double digits in the central countries of capitalism. In the ‘80s the so-called ‘third world' went through a round of hyperinflation that brought down the economies of many Latin American countries.

Bourgeois economists have debated to no end the causes for these inflationary spikes, but what they never say is that the reasons for inflation are contained in the capitalist system itself and the policies of the dominant class:

The anarchic nature of capitalist production.  Capitalist production is social production only in the sense that what is produced is not produced for individual consumption but for the use of others.  Production is bound to produce excesses (over supply) in one sector of production and shortages (over demand) in another. In a system based on the law of value prices changes reflect a lack of conscious, social planning.

Capitalism's drive for maximum profits without regard for social need. The recent rush for the diversion of staple foods like corn and soybeans from human and animal feed to the ‘feeding' of the  fashionable ethanol bio-fuel industry is a point in case. There is no doubt that the bourgeoisie's present obsession with bio-fuels has driven up the price of commodities as much as it has filled up the coffers of big farmers and driven millions to the point of starvation around the world, who have long been dependent on cheap food products coming from the dominant world food producers.

Capitalism's lack of foresight. The consequence of an economic system that is basically geared to the present is well illustrated by capitalism's historic dependence on fossil fuels for its energy needs. This dependence has on the one hand created a nightmare scenario of increasing climate change that is affecting worldwide food production. On the other hand, by putting oil at the center of production and circulation of commodities (and the running of its military machine) it has created a permanent shortage of this commodity. Except for very short intervals, there is never too much oil in the world market -- hence the oil price volatility.

The bourgeoisie's own economic policies in face of the chronic state of crisis of its system are also inflation inducers. The abuse of the money printing machine, the permanent monetary manipulations, the abuse of the mechanism of credit, the ballooning budget deficits -- all contribute to keep inflation going.

Imperialist policies drive also up energy and food prices. The instability in the Middle East and in Nigeria have contributed greatly to driving up the price of oil. In fact the war in Iraq has had a double impact on the recent spike in inflation. On the one hand the war has totally devastated the oil production in that country, cutting down the supply in the world market; and on the other hand, the fact that the US has been running this war ‘off budget' has contributed to the dollar devaluation and the concomitant rise in commodity prices.

To rising inflation workers have to oppose the class struggle

Often enough the bourgeoisie tries to blame workers for rising inflation. The so-called wage/prices spiral is often blamed for the hyperinflation of the 70's in the central countries of capitalism. However in reality wages have never been able to keep up with the pace of inflation. Today rising food and energy prices are squeezing workers' living standards around the world. Workers are facing vanishing real salaries in a time in which lay-offs are everywhere on the agenda. No wonder that food riots and protest against skyrocketing energy prices are multiplying around the world (see article in this issue of Internationalism). Only the working class has the power to stop this madness. Capitalism has no future to offer humanity other than wars and growing pauperization.

Eduardo Smith June 23, 2008.

In capitalist democracy, the corporate news media reportage, commentary, and "debates" faithfully reflect the dominant class's ideas regarding which imperialist and domestic strategy best suits its interests. This means that the media is the mouthpiece of the ruling class.  When capitalism entered into its phase of decadence, the links between the state and the media were strengthened to the point where the mass media became part of the state apparatus of state capitalism. The media now plays a dual role for the bourgeoisie: strengthening the democratic mystification and serving as the propaganda arm of the state.

The myth of the free press is a fundamental cornerstone of democratic society.  The lie peddled is that "freedom of the press" is at the heart of every bourgeois definition of democracy, supposedly guaranteeing the right to criticize the state and the status quo.   This mystification constantly contrasts the "freedom" of the media and press in the "democratic" West with evidence that in "non-democratic" and "totalitarian" nations, the press is under the thumb of the state. Those of us lucky enough to live in "democratic" society supposedly enjoy the advantage and luxury of a media that is the watchdog of the public interest -- the fourth estate, which safeguards the public against wrongdoing by government and corporate officials. This mystification can be successful only if the media is presented as "independent" and free from influence and control

At the same time that it supposedly operates as the independent watchdog of the public interest against the government and against powerful individuals, the media also serves as the propaganda arm of the bourgeois state.  The present electoral campaign offers an illustration of how the media and the capitalist state work cooperatively to provide news coverage that supports the political priorities of the dominant fractions of the ruling class.  As we wrote in Internationalism 145, what is at stake in the 2008 presidential election is the distancing of the new administration from the Bush regime, especially with regard to its tactics and stance
vis-a-vis American imperialist policy.  Just as importantly, the disillusionment in "democracy" following the 2006 elections, coupled with disgust with the war in Iraq, requires that this election bring back into the fold of democratic mystifications an electorate that has grown more and more skeptical of "democracy."  This requires, above all, that the ruling class stage a credible campaign to attract the vote of the young generation, the ones who have never voted and who may otherwise be influenced by their parents' skepticism. Barack Obama fits the bill. To the high echelons of the American bourgeoisie -- who conduct the real debates behind closed doors, away from the public ear -- it has become clear that Barack Obama could be used to rejuvenate the democratic mystification, overcome widespread political disenchantment, and readjust imperialist policy. The media have simply fallen in line. 

From the start, Barack Obama has been elevated to the status of a prophet.  In the words of superdelegate Rober Byrd, Democratic Senator from West Virginia, who's supporting Obama, this candidate offers a "transformative national vision, a commitment to a new and unifying politics, and to a long-needed truth in governance and international relations."  This is the same line that the media has peddled.

Every time so far that an opponent unearthed an Achilles' heel in Obama's positions or affiliations -- as in the case of his controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- the candidate seemed momentarily at a disadvantage only to make an even stronger comeback, thanks to the support of the media.  This is not a matter of how skilled and well prepared Obama's campaign strategists are in responding to  criticisms and accusations or how "objectively" the media report the various scandals and allegations, but rather how the media covers the controversy and what they emphasize. This doesn't depend simply on the shims of media correspondents and executives, but rather on the strength of the support a candidate gets from key elements and groups within the ruling class, including in its permanent state bureaucracy.  Again, the media just follows suit. 

However, we should point out that the fact that the media do their job of propaganda for the state is not a guarantee that the ruling class will obtain the desired results.  In fact, the risk of failing is heightened by the tendency toward a lack of discipline and an "each for themselves" characteristic of decomposition.

We can also see how the ruling class uses the media for state propaganda with regard to imperialist policy.  In every imperialist war, from the Mexican War of 1845-48, to the Spanish-American war of 1898, to WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, even the invasion of Grenada, the Gulf War, and, obviously, the war in Iraq, the media supported the foreign policy initiative of the war, until and unless divergences developed within the bourgeoisie on war policy.  In fact, when parts of the media oppose the official policy of the state, this reflects either a political division of labor intended to legitimize the claims of a free, independent press, or the existence of real divergences within the ruling class.  This was seen clearly in the Vietnam war, where the criticism of the official policy did not reflect a critical section of the media, so much as it reflected which parts of the media were linked to the factions of the bourgeoisie that were critical of the imperialist policy.

It requires a high degree of sophistication for the ruling class to present the media as the ambassadors of "free speech" when in reality they are pawns in the hands of the state.  How do the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie exert control over the media?

Control is not exerted overtly or directly as in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, where the media was directly owned or controlled by the state.  This was a sign of the weakness of the local state capitalism.  The state's inability to mask its control and manipulation of the media weakened its ability to legitimize its domination over society.   By contrast, in the more advanced democracies, control is exerted indirectly through interlocking networks formed by various connections, such as corporate links, whereby major corporations control the media organizations.  A good example of this can be found in the national security industry - for example, GE, which controls NBC news. 

During the ‘80s, the Reagan administration would routinely complain to GE if they didn't like what NBC was doing.  Despite avowals that the corporate parent would never interfere with editorial integrity, they did all the time.  Sometimes  the mere fear that the corporate parent's links to the government might jeopardize  a journalist's career would lead to toeing of the line, suppressing or canceling negative stories about the government's policies.

Prominent journalists and news executives shift back and forth between government, politics and the news media.  ABC's George Stefanopolous was Clinton's press secretary; Tim Russert of NBC was Mario Cuomo's. In the 1980's, Tom Rogers was an RCA executive who became a public affairs official at the Pentagon during the Reagan administration, who then became an executive vice president of NBC News. Roger Ailes, was a media consultant to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush and then became head of CNBC (NBC's business channel on cable TV), and now serves as Rupert Murdoch's chief executive at Fox News. There's no need for clumsy, heavy handed bossing around of the media when the people in charge are part and parcel of the same ruling elites. They know what to do without being told.

There are other examples of interlocking networks forming the backbone of the ruling class's control of the media.  There are institutional links.  Journalists are trained to think that part of their job is to support the prevailing system (rather than questioning or subverting it).  For example, when the Reagan administration restricted reporters' access to covering the Grenada invasion, media spokesmen complained that they wanted to support the administration, but to do so effectively, they needed to be free to the cover the story in full. "Please let us do our job," said one of the prominent TV commentators.

Neither should we overlook social links - journalists and media executives are part of the same class, they have the same educational backgrounds, went to school together, belong to the same social clubs and groups, and share the same tendency to move back and forth between the government and media organizations. This independence of the media is an illusion that helps to make it much stronger in its true role as an arm of the state.

Instead of falling into the trap of believing in the democratic mystifications surrounding the trumpeted "freedom of speech and the press," we would like to reaffirm a few fundamental lessons learned by the working class in its long struggle against the bourgeoisie, this most sophisticated and shrewdest of all exploiting classes.  "Democracy" can only be a sham in a society divided in classes, where one class holds the monopoly of wealth and weapons.  Here, the media can only be in the hands of the exploiting class and its political organization, the state.  It is clear that under these circumstances the media-sponsored political "debates" are an exclusive privilege of the ruling class, in which the working class does not take part.   The electoral "debates," culminating in the election of the president and vice-president, are nothing but a smokescreen to hide the fact that the choice of the team responsible for carrying out the bourgeois state's policies is something that occurs in the corridors of the permanent bureaucracy.  The media helps the ruling class to attain the desired results through a campaign of mass ideological manipulation.

In contrast to this, we would also reaffirm the method the working class has historically created to secure the most open expression of ideas and divergences aimed at the clarification necessary to decide on what course of action to take. This method is the widest possible, collective debate, which finds expression in the massive assemblies the workers create in heightened moments of struggle, not in any media coverage, TV ad, reportage, or news commentary. Ana 6/11/08

In confronting the existence of ethnic, racial, and linguistic differences between workers, the workers' movement has historically been guided by the principle that "workers have no country."  Any compromise on this principle represents a capitulation to bourgeois ideology.

A hundred years ago at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907, an attempt by the opportunists to support the restriction of Chinese and Japanese immigration by bourgeois governments was overwhelmingly defeated. Opposition was so great that the opportunists were actually forced to withdraw the resolution. Instead the Congress adopted an anti-exclusionist position for the workers movement in all countries. In reporting on this Congress, Lenin wrote, "(T)here was an attempt to defend narrow, craft interests, to ban the immigration of workers from backward countries (coolies from China, etc.). This is the same spirit of aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the "civilized" countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are therefore inclined to forget the need for international solidarity. But no one at the Congress defended this craft and petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness. The resolution fully meets the needs of revolutionary Social Democracy."[1] In the US, the opportunists attempted at the 1908, 1910 and 1912 Socialist Party congresses to push through resolutions to evade the decision of the Stuttgart Congress and voiced support for the American Federation of Labor's opposition to immigrants. But they were beaten back every time by comrades advocating international solidarity for all workers. One delegate admonished the opportunists that for the working class "there are no foreigners." Others insisted that the workers' movement must not join with capitalists against groups of workers. In a 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League (the predecessor of the leftwing of the Socialist Party that went on to found the  Communist and Communist Labor parties in the US) Lenin wrote, "In our struggle for true internationalism and against ‘jingo-socialism' we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the S.P. in America who are in favor of restrictions of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907 and against the decisions of Stuttgart). We think that one cannot be internationalist and at the same time in favor of such restrictions."[2]

Historically immigrants played an important role in the workers' movement in the US. The first Marxist revolutionaries came to the US after the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany and later constituted vital links to the European center of the First International. Engels introduced certain problematic conceptions regarding immigrants into the socialist movement in the US which while accurate in certain aspects, were erroneous in others, some of which ultimately led to a negative impact on the organizational activities of American revolutionary movement. Frederich Engels was concerned about the initial slowness of the working class movement to develop in the US. He understood that certain specificities in the American situation were involved, including the lack of a feudal tradition with a strong class system, and the existence of the frontier, which served as a safety valve for the bourgeoisie, allowing discontented workers to escape from a proletarian existence to become a farmer or homesteader in the west. Another was the gulf between native and immigrant workers, in terms of economic opportunities and the inability for radicalized immigrant workers to communicate with native workers. For example, when he criticized the German socialist émigrés in America for not learning English, he wrote that, "they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out-and-out Americans. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they the minority, and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all learn English."[3] It was true that the there was a tendency for German immigrant revolutionaries to confine themselves to theoretical work in the 1880s and to disdain mass work with native, English speaking workers. It was also true that the immigrant-led revolutionary movement did indeed have to open outward to English-speaking American workers, but the emphasis on Americanization of the movement  implicit in these remarks proved to have disastrous consequences for the workers' movement, as it eventually pushed the most politically and theoretically developed and experienced workers into secondary roles, and put leadership in the hands of poorly formed militants, whose primary qualification was being an English-speaking native. After the Russian Revolution, this same policy perspective was pursued by the Communist international with even more disastrous consequences for the early CP. Moscow's insistence that native American-born militants be placed in leadership positions catapulted opportunists and careerists like William Z. Foster to leadership positions, cast Eastern European revolutionaries with left communist leanings totally outside the leadership, and accelerated the triumph of Stalinism in the US party.

Similarly, it was also problematic when Engels remarked that the "great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native workers...(The native working class)  has developed and has also to a great extent organized itself on trade union lines. But it still takes up an aristocratic attitude and wherever possible leaves the ordinary badly paid occupations to the immigrants, of whom only a small section enter the aristocratic trades."[4] Though it accurately described how native and immigrant workers were divided against each other, it implied wrongly that it was the native workers and not the bourgeoisie that was responsible for the gulf between different segments of the working class. Though this comment described the segmentation in the white immigrant working class, in the 1960's the new leftists interpreted it as a basis for the "white skin privilege theory."[5]

In any case, the history of the class struggle in the US itself disproved Engel's view that Americanization of immigrant workers was a precondition for building a strong socialist movement in the US. Class solidarity and unity across ethnic and linguistic roles was a central characteristic of the workers' movement at the turn of the 20th century. The socialist parties in the US had a foreign language press that published dozens of daily and weekly newspapers in different languages.  In 1912, the Socialist Party published 5 English and 8 foreign language daily newspapers, 262 English and 36 foreign weekly newspapers, and 10 English and two foreign news monthlies in the US, and this does not include the Socialist Labor Party publications. The Socialist Party had 31 foreign language federations within it: Armenian, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hispanic, Hungarian,  Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jewish, Latvian, Lettish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Scandinanvian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, South Slavic, Spanish, Swedish, Ukranian, Yugoslav. These federations comprised a majority of the organization. The communist and communist labor parties founded in 1919 had immigrant majority memberships. Similarly the growth in Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) membership in the period before World War I came disproportionately from immigrants, and even the western IWW, which had a large "native" membership, had thousands of Slavs, Chicanos, and Scandinavians in their ranks.

The most famous IWW struggle, the Lawrence textile workers strike of 1912, demonstrated the capacity for solidarity between immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Lawrence was a mill town in Massachusetts where workers worked under deplorable conditions. Half the workers were teenage girls between 14-18 years of age. Skilled craft workers tended to be English speaking workers of English, Irish, and German ancestry. The unskilled workers included French-Canadian, Italian, Slavic, Hungarian, Portuguese, Syrian and Polish immigrants. A wage cut imposed at one of the mills prompted a strike by Polish women weavers, which quickly spread to 20,000 workers. A strike committee, organized under the leadership of the IWW, included two representatives from each ethnic group and demanded a 15 percent wage increase and no reprisals for strikers. Strike meetings were translated into twenty-five languages. When the authorities responded with violent repression, the strike committee dramatized the situation by sending several hundred children of the striking workers to stay with working class sympathizers in New York City. When a second trainload of 100 children were being sent to  worker sympathizers in New Jersey, the authorities attacked the children and their mothers, beating them and arresting them in front of national press coverage, which resulted in a national outpouring of solidarity.

In 1913, during the silk workers' strike in Paterson, NJ, the IWW used a similar tactic, sending strikers' children to stay with "strike mothers" in other cities, once again demonstrating class solidarity across ethnic lines.

As World War I unfolded, the role of émigrés and immigrants in the left-wing of the socialist movement was particularly important. For example, a meeting on Jan. 14, 1917 at the Brooklyn, New York home of Ludwig Lore, an immigrant from Germany, to plan a "program of action" for left forces in the American socialist movement included the participation of Trotsky, who just arrived in New York the day before; Bukharin, who was already resident as an émigré working as editor for Novy Mir, the organ of the Russian Socialist Federation; several other Russian émigrés; S.J. Rutgers, a Dutch revolutionary who was a colleague of Pannenkoek; and Sen Katayama, a Japanese émigré. According to eyewitness accounts the discussion was dominated by the Russians, with Bukharin arguing that the left should immediately split from the Socialist Party and Trotsky that the left should remain within the party for the moment but should advance its critique by publishing an independent bi-monthly organ, which was the position adopted by the meeting. Had he not returned to Russia after the February Revolution, Trotsky would likely have served as leader of the left-wing of the American movement.[6]  The co-existence of many languages was not an obstacle to the movement; to the contrary it was a reflection of its strength. At one mass rally in 1917, Trotsky addressed the crowd in Russian, and others in German, Finnish, English, Lettish, Yiddish and Lithuanian.[7]

We must stand for the defense of the international unity of the working class. We cannot   even appear to legitimize irrational fears and distrust of immigrant workers, or the bourgeoisie's attempt to use immigrants as a scapegoat for the problems that are squarely the responsibility of an economic mode of production that has outlived its usefulness. As proletarian internationalists we reject as bourgeois ideology such constructs as "cultural pollution," "linguistic pollution," "national identity,"  "distrust of foreigners," or "defense of the community or neighborhood." Our intervention cannot be that "you are right to be concerned about the threat to American culture, or national identity, or that it is terrible that you feel like a stranger in your own ‘country'," which would give credence to bourgeois ideology on the question of country, nation, culture, national identity, etc. and strengthen the bourgeois attempt to foster division within the class. On the contrary, our intervention must defend the historical acquisitions of the working class movement that workers have no country; that the defense of national culture or language or identity is not a task or concern of the proletariat, that we must reject the efforts of those who try to use these bourgeois conceptions to exacerbate the differences within the working class, to undermine working class unity. We must stress the unity of the proletariat above all else and international proletarian solidarity in the face of attempts to divide us against ourselves. Anything else constitutes an abandonment of revolutionary principle.  - Jerry Grevin, 6/24/08.

 

---

[1].- Lenin, V.I. "The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart," Proletary No.17, Oct. 20, 1907. In Collected Works, vol. 13, p75. (We leave aside in this text controversies concerning the question of "aristocracy of labor" that Lenin implies.)

[2].- Lenin, V.I., Letter to the Secretary of the Socialist Propaganda League, Nov. 9, 1915. In Collected Works, vol. 21, p423.

[3].- Marx and Engels, Letters to Americans, p. 162-3, 290 (cited in Draper's, Roots of American Communism.)

[4].-Engels, Letter to Schluter, op cit. In Collected Works, vol.49, p392.

[5].-White skin privilege theory was an ideological concoction of the 1960s new leftists, which claimed that a supposed deal between the ruling class and the white working class granted white workers a higher standard of living at the expense of black workers who were victimized by racism and discrimination.

[6].- Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. pp. 80-83

[7].- Ibid. p.79

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/314/may-68 [17]

For over a year now American capitalism has gone through a protracted economic malaise of proportions unseen since the Great Depression of 1929-35. There isn't a month that passes without a dramatic new event in the life of the system, from head-spinning gyrations in the stock markets, to the widespread failure of the most reputable financial institutions, yesterday's symbols of capitalism's alleged vitality. And things have just gotten worse since the summer!

In recent weeks there has been an aggravation of the economic crisis that has shaken the confidence of even the most unrepentant cheerleaders of American capitalism. The official line of the White House has gone from a self-assured defense of the "good fundamentals" of an economy that's just going through a momentary hiccup, to a hysterical call for "all hands on board" to shoulder the task of saving the sinking ship.

Without doubt the bourgeoisie is right to be concerned. What started as the infamous bursting of the housing bubble at the beginning of 2007, has become the greatest financial disaster in 70 years. The pile of failed institutions is growing by the day: the investment banks Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers; the mortgage behemoths Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; the world's biggest insurance company, AIG; Washington Mutual, America's largest savings and loan; and the commercial bank Wachovia -- just to mention the more famous cases. The whole financial system is in shambles. The air is filled with the poisonous odor of capitalism's rotting body, and amidst this agony, we are being given a window into the rarified world of high-stakes gambling that characterized the multi-trillion casino-like-economy centered around Wall Street.

Yet even though the center of the storm is the US economy, its effects are rapidly extending throughout the world. In Central Europe, Russia, Japan, Asia.... everywhere, the financial system is going bust, forcing governments to scramble to the rescue, repeating the American experience, except for the specificities of the local details.

Faced with a dramatically worsening situation, the "collective capitalist", the State, has done its best to manage the economic crisis. But the balance-sheet so far is negative. The State has proved once again unable to stop the blood-letting. And the current so-called "comprehensive bail out" of the financial system at the staggering cost of 700 billion dollars could well go the same way as other measures put in place in the last year.

Behind the financial crisis, the economic crisis of capitalism

The whole bourgeois media is having a field day covering the financial crisis. Newspaper reporters, economic columnists, TV commentators and all kinds of economic "experts" are outdoing each other in their colorful description of the storm blasting the high temples of the American financial system. The message is one of high alarm. The predominant view is that the financial system is on the brink of collapse, and credit - the lifeblood of the system - is drying up, endangering the well-being of everybody. In short, the turmoil on Wall Street, the financial system, is now menacing Main Street, the real economy. There is a lot of moral outrage expressed against the "excesses" and "greed" of the Wall Street crowd that recklessly brought this calamity to themselves and the rest of society. It's almost comical, that this condemnation is coming from the same media that not long ago servilely celebrated the seemingly unstoppable record profit making of the high-flying Wall Street financial industry and the lavish life style of investment bankers, traders, hedge fund speculators, unscrupulous mortgage brokers and other parasitic so-called entrepreneurs.

What the media is not saying - and can't say because its main function is the mystification of reality through conscious choice or self-delusion - is that the current financial crisis is clear and simple an expression of the economic crisis of capitalism, a chronic crisis that is rooted in capitalism's own contradictions and for which the dominant class has no real solution to put forward. On the contrary each remedy put forward to manage the crisis in the end winds up aggravating the malady. This is expressed in the fact that what the economists called recessions are each worse that the preceding one, while the so-called recoveries are increasingly phony.

Four decades of economic crisis

The immediate chain of events behind the current financial crisis is very well known. The American bourgeoisie got out of the recession of 2001 just the same way that it had done before during previous recessions: through state capitalist policies of cheap credit and lax fiscal policies. And just as during other "recoveries," in time these policies feed the illusion of growth and finally end by creating the conditions for a new crash. Thus, the celebrated housing boom became the current housing bust, just as the Internet "revolution" ended in the dot.com bubble being popped in 2001.

This is the basic short story of how the American economy ended up where it is today: with a financial system in total disarray, weighed down by an unstoppable wave of mortgage defaults, housing foreclosures, downward-spiraling real estate prices and mind-blowing gambling bets going bad. The bourgeoisie has yet to recognize officially that its economy is in recession, but given the extent of the carnage, that hardly seems relevant.

The "basic short story," however, is a very poor reflection of reality. Actually, what gives the present financial crisis its historical proportions is the fact that it expresses the accumulation of decades of contradictions of a decadent economic system that has become in all senses a menace to the very survival of humanity. A permanent state of war and economic crisis, with a relentless worsening of standards of living, chronic unemployment, rampant inflation and growing insecurity for the working class and other non-exploiting sectors of the population - this has been the history of capitalism for most of the last century. This is a system that has put humanity through two devastating World Wars and the Great Depression, a dreadful worldwide crisis to which the present turmoil is often being compared.

After the brief respite during the post-World War II period of reconstruction, the economic crisis came once again to the forefront, shattering the vision of unlimited, crisis-free prosperity put forward by the system's acolytes based on the record setting economic growth of the post-war period in the central countries of capitalism.

The economic malaise that started at the end of the 1960's exploded in a full blown worldwide economic crisis at the beginning of the 70's and has since persisted like a slow growing terminal cancer at the center of the body of capitalism.

It is not an accident that the US economy is today, just as it was in the ‘70s at the center of the storm. In August 1971 Richard Nixon reneged on the U.S. commitments under the American-brokered 1943 Breton Woods System that had guaranteed the dollar convertibility to gold and that had given the post-war financial and commercial systems a semblance of stability. This turnaround of the American bourgeoisie left the use of the dollar as a world currency without an economic rationale and has contributed greatly to the fragility of the world financial system showcased in today's crisis. The world's banks are awash with paper dollars. The currency reserves of most countries are held mostly in dollars. In fact there are, by far, more dollars circulating around the world that in the US economy. This insane situation is based on a simple collective delusion: that behind the dollar stands the so-called "full faith and credit" of the US government, which amounts to an overt overestimation of the U.S. creditworthiness. If the present U.S. financial turmoil does not bring a reality check to the global financial system, then nothing will.

The lack of solvent demand relative to the needs of capitalistic accumulation -- the root of the current open crisis of capitalism dating back to the end of the sixties -- is illustrated by a twin feature of the life of capitalism in recent decades: the perversion of credit and the explosion of speculation.

Faced with a lack of solvent markets to absorb its production, capitalism has found the way to square the circle: give it away on credit. Not an economically rational credit based on a reasonable expectancy of repayment of a debt with a profit -- a normal capitalist practice and a powerful tool for the development of capitalism -- but instead, credit as a way to keep the system artificially going to prevent its collapse under the weight of its historical crisis. This is the reason behind the reckless explosion in recent decades of both individual debt (credit cards, auto loans, student loans, personal loans, mortgages) and corporate and public debt (which in many cases will never be repaid). After so many years of abuse of the credit-debt mechanism, it is not surprising that the financial system is now cracking up.

Furthermore, faced with a diminishing rate of profit in the process of production, capital has been turning the world over towards the sphere of speculation, creating a virtual casino economy where - on paper - fortunes are made and lost with the mere tapping of a computer keyboard in the comfortable rooms of traders, hedge fund managers and other investment specialists. All this without the bothersome creation and sale of commodities in the process of production and circulation that defines capitalism as a mode of production! Thanks to the collapse of the real estate bubble and the current financial turmoil, a rare window has been opened into the secret world of high stakes gambling on such immaterial things as the so-called "credit default swaps," and the now radioactive "mortgage securities." It is no wonder that the global financial system is falling apart. Sure, speculation has always been a component of capitalism, but the amount of capital involved in it today, its weight on the economy as a whole, the extent to which it has managed to permeate increasing layers of society -- even the working class's future livelihood is being made dependent on pension fund investments on speculative schemes - is unprecedented and is itself a condemnation of capitalism as a viable mode of production for society.

The show must go on

Mr. Paulson, the US treasury secretary, and Mr. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, are the men of the hour, the media reporting their every word, change of mood and actions 24/7. All this for free, while McCain and Obama have to pay millions to get their electoral message across - surely, the candidates can't be happy about it!

Evidently, the men in charge of managing the economic crisis are very busy these days. But the real question is what has the State accomplished and what can be expected from the policies so far being put forward?

The first thing to note about the bourgeoisie's response to the early signs that the housing boom was over in 2007, was, judging by its actions, that it was a total underestimation of the gravity of situation that was going to unfold. Following the beginning of the housing bust and the financial system turmoil during 2007, the Federal Reserve responded with its conventional policies of monetary manipulation, sharply reducing in record time the Fed interest fund rate to lower the cost of credit and pumping in tons of money directly into the financial system, trying to shore up the deteriorating finances of banks and other financial institutions. For their part the White House and Congress also made use of their traditional fiscal tools in the management of the crisis. At the beginning of 2008, they passed a so-called "stimulus package" composed of tax rebates for consumers, tax breaks for businesses and other measures directed at reviving the slumping housing market. These measures were supposed to avert a recession. As the somewhat upbeat economic forecast of Bernanke in mid-February put it, "My baseline outlook involves a period of sluggish growth, followed by somewhat stronger pace of growth starting later this year as the effects of (Fed) and fiscal stimulus begin to be felt" (USA Today, February 15, 2008).

A few days later, the collapse of Bear Stearns, the fifth biggest investment bank in the country, would raise the stakes and foretell the current financial tsunami blasting the American and global financial system, which has already totally changed Wall Street financial landscape.

According to public declarations emanating from all corners of the State, the bourgeoisie is now truly worried about the dangers posed to its system by the present situation and has decided to bring in the big State guns to fix the situation. This is the sense of the so-called 700 billion dollar, "comprehensive" bailout program that the dominant class has finally agreed upon.

It remains to be seen what effects this new program will have in the bourgeoisie's attempts to manage the crisis of its system. Nonetheless, clearly, this program is an attempt to make the working class - both current and future generations - pay for the financial debacle.

On the other hand, this bailout, which in essence will be financed in the short term by public debt, could easily backfire, fueling inflation and further economic turmoil.

Finally, there is one more important thing to underline in relation to the bourgeoisie's policies of the last year: on the one hand they make clear the purely ideological character of the so-called American "free market" economy, and on the other, they overtly demonstrate the dominant role of the State in the economy - what revolutionaries have long characterized as state capitalism.

And the working class?!

Faced with the deepening economic crisis, the bourgeois media's message to society is that "we are all in this together". Yes, it argues, some CEO's are guilty of excess and greed, but we ALL are more or less responsible for the financial mess. "Everyone" took advantage of the good old days of easy and cheap credit of the debt functioning economy and we all have to line up in a common effort behind the State efforts to save the economy. This is nonsense. The working class has no say on how the bourgeoisie runs its decaying system. The fact is that the condition of the working class has known no improvements over the last four decades of bourgeois gimmicks aimed at keeping its economic system afloat. Unless they want to consider all matter of suffocating debts -credit cards, auto loans, student loans, sky-high mortgages, etc. - a change for the better that workers are obliged to incur in order to partake of the increasingly elusive "American dream".

Politicians, in particular those belonging to left wing, want workers to believe that they are concerned about the suffering of the working class. Both the bourgeois left and right want us to believe that the answer to rising unemployment, eroding salaries, the sorry state of the health care system and deteriorating pensions lie in the ballot box, that all is needed is the right president or congressman. However the reality is that the bourgeoisie has no solution to the crisis of its system and no future to offer society other than an increasingly devastating crisis and murderous imperialist wars.

The hard reality is that workers have been paying for years for the crisis of capitalism. And today face with a barrage of attacks from all directions they have no choice but to oppose capitalism's assault on their working and living conditions on their own terrain, the terrain of the class struggle - fighting against the logic of capitalist exploitation. Against capitalism's future of crisis and war, the working class must put forward its own perspective of a society based on human needs.

Eduardo Smith, Oct. 3, 2008.

The election media blitz is running full blast. We hear the same media messages over and over: we are supposedly witnessing the most important election in American history; we face a stark choice between sharply different candidates; this election will determine the future direction of society for generations to come.

Of course that is what they always say about presidential elections. It makes for great theater, even if it has nothing to do with reality. It's hard to remember the last time the media told us that the current presidential election is meaningless, that it offers a choice between indistinguishable opponents, or that no matter who wins nothing much will change.

And of course this year is even more historic than usual -- the first African American candidate nominated for president by a major party on one ticket and a woman running for vice president on the Republican line for the first time in history. No matter who wins, the media tells us, we will have an historic first.

For the working class, reality is quite different from the media mythology. No matter who wins, no matter who occupies the White House, the situation for the working class will be the same

- our sons and daughters will be called upon to shed their blood for American imperialism, which will be forced to resort to more and more military interventions throughout the world

- the economic crisis will continue unabated attacking our wages, our standard of living, our health care, our pensions, our housing conditions, social services

- the social divisions that exist in the U.S. will continue to worsen; the rich will get richer and the poor poorer

- unemployment will continue to grow

- the future will continue to look bleak.

Of course the big "news" in this election is Obama as an African American presidential candidate and his rhetoric about change, which is attracting millions of young people to his candidacy. However black or white or biracial he may be, Obama is just another capitalist politician like any other. Despite his early opposition to the war in Iraq, he is in fact no anti-war candidate. He made it crystal clear in his convention acceptance speech that he is as committed to using military power to defend American imperialist interests as any other capitalist politician. He doesn't want to bring the troops home from Iraq; he wants to transfer troops to the war in Afghanistan and launch military strikes into Pakistan, and to be prepared to unleash war elsewhere. His main criticism of Bush policy is that the US military is spread so thin that it leaves it unable to respond to other threats to its hegemony, like in Georgia. Obama is just as much a war monger as McCain. On the economy, none of his policies can deal with the fact that the problem with the economy is not policy mistakes by Bush, but the global crisis of capitalism, which is an historically anachronistic system, about which Obama is powerless to do anything.

For capitalism, the election campaign is a crucial element in the democratic mystification, the ideological swindle that spins the myth that in a capitalist democracy everyone is equal and has the opportunity to speak his/her mind, that everyone can participate in making the decisions on how society is to be run. The ruling class pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign, and mobilizes its mass media, its unions, its educational institutions, and its left and right political organizations to reinforce this myth and pull workers into the electoral circus. For the ruling class, the elections are a valuable tool in misleading working people, in tying them to the state, derailing them from the class struggle, and bamboozling them into thinking they are "free" -- free to choose their oppressors for the next four years.

Capitalist elections weren't always such an empty sham. In the 19th century when capitalism was still a growing, historically progressive system, capable of further developing the forces of production, elections constituted the venue where the capitalist class decided upon its "executive committee" to control the government and rule society. Various factions of the ruling class, defending different programmatic orientations, different economic interests, such as finance capital, or the railroads or the oil industry, competed with each other for control of the state. In this period, because capitalism was still expanding and it was therefore still possible to wrest significant reforms from the system, it made sense for the workers movement to participate in elections and take advantage of the factional disputes within the ruling class to win gains for the working class, such as the eight hour day and the end to child labor.

But this situation changed dramatically in the early 20th century with the completion of the world market, when capitalism reached the zenith of its historic development and became a fetter on the further development of the productive forces. With the system in decay, the possibility of wresting durable social reforms from the capitalist system no longer existed, and the orientation of the workers movement toward capitalist elections was fundamentally altered. The determination of political policy switched definitively into the hands of the executive branch, the permanent bureaucracy in particular, which rules in the interests of the national capital- Capitalist Elections Against the Working Class ism and prepares constantly for the deadly competition with rival nations.

With the disappearance of the historical circumstances that made elections relevant to the workers movement, electoralism inevitably became an instrument of political mystification, an ideological swindle perpetuating the democratic myth and obscuring the true nature of the capitalist class dictatorship and fostering the illusion that working people can participate in the determination of governmental policies.

In this context, the electoral circus represents the grand ideological maneuver of the bourgeoisie. For the greater part of the past century the American bourgeoisie has been particularly adept in controlling presidential campaigns to put in place political teams that would be capable of implementing its strategic orientations and promote the credibility of the electoral circus. The party in power in the White House was generally determined by carefully orchestrated media manipulation of the electoral process to generate the desired outcomes. Under the political discipline within the ruling class, the major parties and their candidates could be relied upon to accept the division of labor determined by the dominant fractions. The factors at play in determining the desired leftright political division of labor at the level of the national state may vary depending upon prevailing domestic or international circumstances. This ability to control the outcomes of elections and to maintain discipline within its own ranks began to deteriorate after the collapse of the bloc system on the international level, leading to the embarrassing results of the Bush administration in the stolen election of 2000, which did not serve well the interests of the ruling class.

Today there are two fundamental political objectives for the dominant fractions of the American capitalist class in the coming presidential election:

- a rectification of the Bush administration's disastrous imperialist policy blunders in order to significantly restore American authority on the international level and enable it to intervene militarily in other pats of the world,

- a total refurbishment of the democratic mystification, which has taken a terrible beating since the year 2000.

The dominant class has already made great strides in setting the stage for repairing the mess that the Bush administration has made of imperialist policy. Obama's proposed withdrawal from Iraq over two years has already been agreed to by the Iraqi regime and the Bush Administration. The groundwork is in place for a more sophisticated, "multilateral" imperialist policy, that will lessen American imperialism's growing isolation and reestablish its authority in the international arena.

In terms of resuscitating the electoral mystification, Obama clearly best serves the interests of the dominant class. His charismatic, but largely vacuous, appeals for change have triggered a rarely seen enthusiasm among young generations of voters, who have been largely apathetic to the capitalist political process, drawing them into electoral politics in large numbers for the first time in many years. Capitalist political pundits have promoted the Obama phenomenon as "a social movement," that has tapped the wellsprings of "hope" and a desire for change.

To the contrary, what we are witnessing is not a social movement, but an extremely successful ideological campaign, reviving the electoral mystification. However, the Obama candidacy ultimately risks aggravating the very problems that it's designed to redress. If he loses the general election, disillusionment will set in with millions of young people. If he wins the election, it will be impossible for him to deliver any significant change, which will also give rise to widespread disappointment and disillusionment.

For the working class the election is a complete diversion. The only way to defend our interests is the class struggle, in the streets and in the workplaces - against the pay cuts, and layoffs, against the attacks on our living conditions, against imperialist war. This daily struggle to defend working class interests against capitalism holds within it the seeds of the development of class consciousness, of a working class movement that will be capable of confronting capitalism head on and destroying this social system based on the exploitation of man by man and powered by the drive for profits with a social order controlled by working people themselves, where the fulfillment of social need is the driving force.

Internationalism, September 2008

The ruling class likes to call the period of time that goes from one recession to another a "recovery." The last such period in the U.S. began in 2002 and ended in 2007 with the bursting of the speculative real estate bubble.  What was unique about this alleged period of capitalist "prosperity" was that the living conditions of the working class actually continued to deteriorate at an alarming rate- even during the economic recovery. There was no recovery for the working class, in either employment, wages, benefits or working conditions.  Even from the ruling class's own figures, we can see clearly the dreadful conditions and increasing pauperization under which the working class in the U.S. already lives as the economy enters the depths of worsening economic crisis.

Let's take a look at health coverage, for example.  According to the Census Bureau, which released its annual report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage for the US population August 26, the number of people without health insurance decreased from 47 million in 2006 to 45.7 million last year.  While this would seem to encourage the ruling class to continue to spread its lies about the successes of capitalism in lifting people's overall conditions of existence, they cannot bask in their own glory for too long, because this drop is due to an increased number of people enrolled in Medicaid and other public programs. In other words, the number of people without health insurance dropped because there is an increasing number of people whose income has declined so significantly that they are now poor enough to qualify for Medicaid! Rather than showing progress, the Census Bureau figures prove that a higher number of Americans are becoming pauperized. In any case, uninsured Americans are today 7.2 million stronger than in 2000. 

But these numbers don't tell the whole story, because those workers who still have employer-provided health benefits have seen an erosion in the extent and quality of coverage provided.  Employer-provided health care coverage eroded from 1979 until 1993-94, when it stabilized, and then began falling again from 2000 through 2006. Coverage dropped from 69% of workers in 1979 to 55% in 2006, with a 3.9 percentage-point fall since 2000, which translates into an increasing differential in life span between rich and poor.  For example, in 1980 the rich lived on average 2.8 years longer than the poor. By 2000, despite twenty years of advances in medical science, the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor increased to 4.5 years.

The percentage of American workers covered by employer pension plans has seen a similar decline. In 1979, nearly 51 percent of American workers were covered by employer pension plans, which declined to 45.6 percent by the year 2000.  During the just-ended economic recovery, this figure dropped by another 2.8 percent; it was only 42.8% in 2006. Pension plan quality also eroded, with the percentage of workers in defined benefit pension plans,  the "traditional" type of pension that assures workers  a definite pension payment (usually based on a formula linked to years of service and average yearly pay at time of retirement) declining from 39% in 1980 to just 18% in 2004. This means that many more workers are paying for their own pension benefits or relying almost exclusively on the meager benefits from a social security check. In fact, the share of workers with a so-called "defined-contribution pension" plan who have to contribute to their pension accounts and whose benefit payments are uncertain and dependent on stock market fluctuations rose from 8% to 31% since 1980.  Increasingly, workers nearing retirement age are putting off their plans to retire. A higher percentage of Americans older than 55 are now working than at any time since 1970. While still working, they are also dipping into their 401(k) accounts and borrowing form the accounts to pay for living expenses, including credit card and mortgage debt.  

The federal government also claims that the overall poverty rate dipped slightly, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is because of the absurdity of the artificially low official poverty measure, which is $21,027 annual income for a family of four-- $404 a week for four people!    Currently, under this official measure, 36 million people lived in poverty in 2006. But other, more realistic measures put 16 million more people living in poverty - approximately 52 million or nearly 18 percent of the population. And these figures don't take into account the growing debt of families who struggle to stay out of poverty, by borrowing beyond their means to maintain their standard of living.

This pauperization of the working class in the U.S. has occurred at the same time as productivity has increased faster than in earlier periods.  As the rich grow richer, many working class households are left with little or nothing in the way of assets and often with significant debt.  Approximately 30% of households have a net worth of less than $10,000, and approximately one in six households have zero or negative net wealth.  For over a quarter of American households, income from Social Security, pensions, and personal savings are expected to replace less than half of their pre-retirement income, which is already forcing many to continue to work longer before retiring, for longer hours, thus affecting further their health and chance to live longer.  And this is happening in the midst economic "recovery"!  The only thing that "recovered" during the "recovery" was productivity, which grew by 11%, a faster growth than any recovery since the 1970's.  Yet, median hourly compensation did not grow at all during the same period.

Notwithstanding the dreariness of these figures, it is the figures on unemployment which more starkly reveal at once the suffering of the working class and the definite tendency of capitalism in decadence to reduce its own ability to secure survival for the vast majority of the masses.  Because it took longer -nearly four years-during the last "recovery" to return to the employment levels prior to the recession of 2001, because employment growth remained sluggish thereafter, because the employment-to-population ratio during the "recovery" deteriorated for the first time on record, and because there hasn't been an adequate income growth for most workers for a long time, the present recession will have tremendous repercussions on a working class already embattled by unemployment, the erosion of their living standards, and falling wages also due to inflation.  So far in 2008 alone, the economy has lost over 760,000 jobs even before the job losses stemming from September's financial industry meltdown have been counted, and  official unemployment has jumped to 6.1% from 5.5% by mid-2008, up from 4.4% in March 2007.  This adds more than 2,300.000 unemployed to the jobless rolls. There are official 9.5 million workers without jobs, 2 million unemployed for more than 6 months. Eight hundred thousand have seen their unemployment benefits expire. And this does not include the "discouraged" workers who have no job and have given up looking for jobs that do not exist and or the 6.1 million workers who are involuntarily working part-time jobs and are officially considered "employed."

The growing pauperization of the working class during the last recovery period sets the stage for an even more devastating impact of the new recessions, undoubtedly raising the stakes and increasing the pressure for workers to fight back.  In this sense, the impact of the crisis is a potential ally to the working class - it will help workers to see the dead end that this moribund system offers.  If  the working class in the U.S. is today more vulnerable than ever to the brutality of capitalism in a state of permanent crisis, if more and more are workers are laid off, more and more lose health coverage and pension benefits now, after the years of so-called "recovery," what is in store for the immediate future?   For its own survival, the working class will have to take the path of struggle.  As its discontent builds, and as the class fights back, it will develop the consciousness that it is the only force in society that has a real future to offer to the world. As the effects of the electoral circus recede in significance, the bourgeoisie will have to confront an angrier, and more combative, class. 

Ana 10/2/08

This article has already appeared in World Revolution 318. [23]

This article has already appeared in World Revolution no.318 [24] .

The following text was prepared as a contribution to a discussion on the lessons the 1960's initiated by the primarily Chicago-based Platypus group, which is involved in the revived SDS organization. In the spring issue of their publication, the Platypus comrades reported on their frustration on the cancellation of a public panel discussion on the political experiences of the 1960's after Mike Klonsky and Rick Ayers, prominent SDS leaders from 40 years ago, abruptly withdrew from the forum after seeing the questions that would be posed to the panelists. -- Internationalism

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The comrades of Internationalism1 have read with interest your report on Klonksy and Ayers' abrupt withdrawal from your scheduled panel discussion on the lessons of the 1960's. It's probably not surprising that they backed away when they realized from your prepared questions that they weren't being invited to reminisce about the "glory days" of the Sixties, but to participate in a serious reflection on the shortcomings and failures of the New Left. We salute your effort to go beyond "image" and media hype and subject the political experiences of the Sixties to critical examination.

There was indeed a mass movement in the 1960's that mobilized millions of young people who were outraged at the injustice, exploitation and oppression that they saw around them, but it is also true that  movement ultimately failed to change the world or  build an ongoing movement that could confront capitalism. The questions you posed to the panelists reflect an extremely correct and appropriate preoccupation to understand what happened in the Sixties, why the movement didn't succeed in achieving revolutionary change and what can be learned from that experience so as to avoid needlessly repeating the errors of the past in the future. We ourselves have been publishing a series of articles on 1968 in our press and our web site (www.internationalism.org [25]), which present an in depth analysis, but we would like to contribute some general comments in response to the questions posed to the panelists.

Regarding the heritage of the "Old Left," one of the worst consequences of the failure of the revolutionary workers struggles in the 1917-23 period was the virtual burial of genuine Marxism under a mountain of lies and distortions, which established Stalinism as the personification of communism, whereas it actually represented the advanced guard of the counter-revolution alongside "democratic" anti-fascism. During World War II the false "communist" parties were joined by an equally false opposition - Trotskyism which constituted more of a critical appendage to Stalinism and anti-fascism than a proletarian alternative. Since 1945, this "Old Left" constituted the left wing of capitalist politics defending various brands of state capitalist policy orientations, totally outside the revolutionary Marxist tradition. What marked them most clearly as agents of bourgeois ideology has been their defense of state capitalism by attempting to tie workers to the state, through the left parties, the trade unions, and pointless "reform" struggles that foster the illusion that capitalism can be improved.  This was essentially what the "Old Left" appeared to the emerging revolutionaries in the 1960's as irrelevant, totalitarian, reformist, and sectarian.

Unfortunately most who came of political age in the Sixties were totally unaware of the political work of the small groups of the communist left2, especially the Dutch, German and Italian communist left groups, who had detached themselves from the degenerating Communist International and critiqued the failures of the 1920's and ‘30's, elaborating theoretical analyses of capitalist decadence1, state capitalism, the changed conditions of class struggle, the integration of the unions into the state apparatus, the role of the party in relation to the class, the rejection of substitutionism, the defense of internationalism and revolutionary defeatism in the face of the second imperialist world war, and so on.

Because of this break in knowledge of the genuine continuators of revolutionary Marxism, the Sixties generation fell prey to such aberrations as empiricism, impatience for "action" without a theoretical framework, a rejection of the working class as revolutionary agent in society,  a preposterous search for new revolutionary agents (youth, minorities, students, etc.), and a host of other detours from revolutionary Marxism. The New Left failed to understand that Marxism had identified the working class as the agent of revolution based on its objective role within capitalist society, regardless of the level of its consciousness at any particular moment in history.  

Lacking an adequate Marxist perspective, it was difficult to distinguish between symptoms and causes of social injustices, so separatist politics (Black Power, feminism, identity politics, gay liberation) became predominant. There was a widespread misconception that the elimination of racism or sexism or homophobia was a precondition to develop a revolutionary movement that could change society, whereas, the precondition to eliminate these ideological poisons that capitalism uses to divide the working class against itself is the revolutionary destruction of capitalism itself. There was an inability to understand that these movements, focused on bourgeois legalisms and rights, tied the oppressed to the state, rather than building a movement that could destroy the state.

The rejection of the "labor movement" as part of the problem and not the solution, as you put it, failed to differentiate on the one hand between the working class, as an exploited and revolutionary class, and the trade unions, organizations that had once been working class in nature but had long since become integrated into the state apparatus of capitalism as a means to control workers and derail class struggle on the other. This left the Sixties generation with no effective orientation towards the working class struggle. 

Lacking a theoretical Marxist compass, the movement lurched from one confused orientation to another. Starting out with a rejection of the "Old Left" in the beginning of the Sixties, by the end of the decade "New Left" leaders came full circle and embraced the worst forms of Stalinism, (demanding support for the regimes in China, North Vietnam and North Korea as a condition for membership) and terrorist adventurism.

The "Old Left" and the "New Left" ultimately wound up in the same place - in the ideological service of state capitalism and outside the revolutionary Marxist tradition. No wonder Klonsky and Ayers chose not to confront critically the consequences of their activism. 

Jerry Grevin for Internationalism 15/10/08 

Notes

1.- Internationalism is the U.S. section of the International Communist Current.

2.- For an overview of the history of the communist left see https://en.internationalism.org/the-communist-left [26]

3.- For a description of the theory of capitalist decadence see https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/decadence [27]