The $1.9 trillion “America Rescue Plan” from Jim Crow Joe Biden, rammed through a Democrat-controlled Congress, is an act of desperation by the U.S. finance capital bosses. As they move toward more open fascism and global war, these liberal rulers need to build loyalty among workers devastated by Covid-19, mass unemployment, and the basic contradictions of the profit system.
The finance capitalists—the Big Fascists who have mostly run the U.S. and dominated the globe since World War II—are now threatened on all sides. They’re losing geopolitical ground by the day to China, their chief inter-imperialist rival. Their own Capitol was besieged by armed militias loyal to the openly racist Small Fascists, the isolationist wing led by the Koch and Mercer and DeVos families, among others. Meanwhile, tens of millions of workers have lost confidence in a system that can’t provide decent-paying jobs, basic healthcare in a pandemic, or enough reliable energy to keep their children from freezing to death in a winter storm (see CHALLENGE, 3/17).
As the U.S. economy stalls with a “real” unemployment rate of more than 11 percent (thebalance.com, 3/6), the bosses must figure out a way to give it a shot to the heart to get things back up and running. And as they continue down an inevitable collision course toward world war, they must build fascism at home. The crumbs in Biden’s stimulus package point to continuing crises in the present and to horrific carnage in the not-so-distant future. That is why Progressive Labor Party and the international working class must organize to smash the bosses and seize state power with communist revolution.
Capitalist criminal neglect
Millions of jobs have been lost in the pandemic. Many will never be recovered. Due to capitalism’s racist inequalities, Black and Latin workers have been hit hardest. Black women workers, in particular, have been devastated by a perfect storm of layoffs, shuttered schools, and added childcare responsibilities (Wall Street Journal, 3/6).
The Biden-Kamala Harris administration claims that the newly enacted tax credits will cut child poverty by 50 percent. Yet adjusted for inflation, the additional income is less than half what poor families received in the 1970s through the miserly Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. That was before Democrats like Bill Clinton and Biden took an ax to it in the name of welfare reform (CNBC, 3/11).
In a nation with more than 10 million poor children (Pew Research Center, 11/20/20), a 50 percent reduction would leave 5 million of them impoverished—an atrocity. Biden’s crumbs, touted as “transformational” by cheerleader sellouts like the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg and Paul Krugman, is a woefully inadequate response to the nightmares children face under this brutal system: hunger, homelessness, lack of healthcare and childcare, racist miseducation, abuse, neglect, incarceration, and police terror. Communism will mean an end to this litany of capitalist horrors inflicted on the most vulnerable!
Another pathetic relief measure under the Stimulus Crumbs law is the expansion of unemployment benefits. In the first stimulus last spring, the bosses doled out an extra $600 a week for unemployed workers. This time around, the U.S. Senate cut the added benefit to $300 a week. They caved to West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, who takes money hand over fist from the oil and coal bosses. That didn’t stop him from making the racist argument that $400 would be a “disincentive” to workers looking for jobs (Newsweek, 3/5).
To add injury to insult, a $15 minimum wage was stripped out of the law. The splits among the capitalist rulers—both between the Big and Small Fascists and within the finance capital camp—left them unable to raise the minimum wage beyond the current $7.25 an hour. That’s well under the poverty level for a single parent with only one child, even if that parent works full time (City Watch, 6/20).
Bosses will kill millions to save capitali$m
During this profound crisis of global capitalism, a similar period offers some lessons: the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then as now, the U.S. bosses faced growing threats, from Europe to the Pacific. Inspired by the worker-run Soviet Union, which had no unemployment, U.S. workers were much more militant.  In 1934 alone, there were more than 2,000 strikes. Then as now, the bosses turned to a reboot to save U.S. capitalism: the New Deal, which created more than 12 million jobs through the Work Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration (Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb).
But like all programs under capitalism, the New Deal was riddled with racist inequality. New programs like Social Security excluded domestic and farm workers, a huge section of the Black and Latin working class—just as Biden’s America Rescue Plan excludes undocumented workers.
The more farsighted Big Fascists know that a limited and temporary relief plan won’t be enough to build the patriotic movement they need for World War III. Now they’re promising an infrastructure bill and climate legislation--to create more jobs, and to help them prepare for war. What remains to be seen is whether the Biden-led bosses can summon the unity and discipline they need to pay for all these programs by raising taxes on their own class (CNBC, 3/10).
The main lesson, though, is that the New Deal, a far more significant restructuring of U.S. capitalism, couldn’t end the Depression. That required World War II and the destruction of the productive capacities of many of the major industrial powers. The carnage cost 100 million workers their lives. The bosses know that war is the only way to address the contradictions of their system.
Communism: the real rescue plan
We have seen glimpses of a communist future in the many mutual aid efforts since the beginning of the pandemic. Workers have answered the call by donating funds, distributing food, and defending families faced with eviction. These are the previews of a communist world based on the principle: “to each according to need, from each according to commitment.” Under communism there will be no poverty, unemployment, or imperialist war. Only a communist revolution under the banner of Progressive Labor Party can create the society the working class deserves. Join us!