The recent drama over the federal debt limit, with politicians in gridlock amid scare stories that the U.S. government might default on its bills, marks a significant move toward fascism by an embattled capitalist ruling class.
A default was averted when Democrats and Republicans agreed to at least $2.1 trillion spending cut over the next decade to counter a hike in the debt “ceiling,” the legal cap set by Congress on government borrowing. But the rulers’ internal crisis remains. The debt ceiling battle reveals their two essential needs in the current period:
To wring extreme profits from the working class with cuts in critical social services in a period of perpetual and massive racist unemployment.
To discipline their own ranks to help fund imperialist wars abroad and repair a crumbling infrastructure at home.
These imperatives are the hallmarks of fascism, the phase of capitalism that forces the ruling class to discard its mask of liberal democracy. President Obama recently took the lead on both fronts with his “Grand Bargain.” This ploy for “shared sacrifice” called for a devastating $3 trillion in spending cuts over the next ten years, alongside just $1 trillion in tax increases for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
The Republicans’ “no-new-taxes” (on the rich) pledge, pushed hardest by the elements coalescing around the Tea Party, gives Obama cover to maintain his liberal credentials even as he ruthlessly targets the most vulnerable workers: the old, the sick, the poor. And as the first black president, he is the bosses’ perfect tool to impose racist cutbacks that fall most heavily on black and Latino workers, the same people who were hardest hit by the latest economic crisis (see box on page 5).
Capitalists Divided
Liberal analysts misrepresented Washington’s debt standoff as a battle between crazed GOP ideologues and sane if ineffectual Democrats, like Obama, who are striving to protect a fragile economy.
In fact, both sides are acting rationally, against the working class, in selfish pursuit of profits. They represent two camps of capitalists with conflicting interests. As Lenin noted in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, there is a yawning gulf between entrepreneurs, who profit by managing capital in productive businesses, and financiers, who profit purely from “money capital” and seek to extend their domination over finance capitalists in other countries. The biggest financiers’ massive overseas investments require “the intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world.” By that, Lenin meant world war.
In the U.S. today, both capitalist factions demand the racist looting of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Their clash stems from how they get their respective wealth. The entrepreneurs (such as Koch Industries; see box) have a short-term, domestic focus that favors younger, rising firms. The financiers, represented by Obama and the banker-backed liberal wing led by the Rockefeller interests, have a longer-term, imperialist outlook to defend their worldwide empire, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Somalia and beyond. The financial capitalists still dominate U.S. policy — although, as the debt flap reveals, not absolutely.
On July 28, the nation’s biggest imperialist bankers sent a letter to Obama to plead for a resolution to the recent Congressional impasse. The consequences of a default, they wrote, would be “very grave” for “America’s global economic leadership” — a code phrase for imperialism. The signers included the chiefs of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of New York Mellon, and Boston’s State Street, which hold a combined $71 trillion in global assets under custody. By contrast, Forbes magazine estimates the Kochs’ wealth at $44 billion.
Going Where the Money Is
Obama’s cut and tax strategy has been shelved for now. But the president and his cheerleaders at the New York Times, both representing the main wing of the ruling class, will soon be back to demand that bosses big and small pony up — and $1 trillion will be just a down payment.
For the bosses, it’s less a matter of “fairness” than of narrowing options. They are willing and eager to drain the working class, but they’re running into objective limits. The global financial meltdown obliterated millions of jobs in the U.S., along with the tax revenues they generate. (In June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “real” unemployment rate — including unemployed, under-employed, and people “marginally attached to the workforce” — stood at 16.2 %, or more than 25 million people suffering for lack of work in the third year of Obama’s dead-on-arrival “recovery.” And for black and Latino workers, those jobless rates are double.)
Workers are being sucked dry. Thinning the social safety net will not be enough to keep the war machine humming. Both Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who signed off on the Grand Bargain before buckling to anti-tax Tea Party pressure, know that they’ll eventually have to go to where the money is: to the rich.
In 2008, the median income of the U.S. capitalist elite — the top 0.1% — was $6 million, versus $50,000 for American households as a whole. In 2007, the top 1% of the population controlled 43% of the nation’s financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), or 1½ times the bottom 95 percent. The federal government has locked in these gross inequalities by slashing capital gains and estate taxes and by failing to enforce anti-trust laws (Vanity Fair, May 2011).
But even as the biggest U.S. capitalists rake in more and more, they are contributing less and less to the government that is dedicated to protect their interests. Corporate income taxes now account for only 7% of federal revenues, as compared to 23% in 1960. The jobless rate tells us that corporations aren’t using this extra cash to hire more workers. Instead, they’re hoarding. The bloodsucking banks aside, non-financial companies are sitting on close to $2 trillion in liquid assets.
The outrageous greed of the super-wealthy fits neatly with the small-government creed of the Tea Party caucus. It works less well, however, with the overriding needs of U.S. imperialism. The debt ceiling fracas was the public face of the rulers’ fight over how to divide their wealth and rule their weakening empire. The bitter struggle over the fallback measure, with no boost in needed revenues, is a mere prelude to the struggle to come. The battle should escalate in the fall, when Obama pitches his “balanced approach” (more taxes) to the new Congressional “supercommittee” charged with fleshing out the deficit reduction deal.
Bosses’ Rx: War and Fascism
In the end, the rulers’ Rockefeller-led main wing must prevail for U.S. imperialism to fend off its competition. The regional wars of today foreshadow the world war to come, as new imperialist rivals (China, India, Brazil) and old ones (France, Germany, Russia) challenge U.S. dominance. Both now and later, huge infusions of cash will be required to expand the military. Meanwhile, Obama’s backers will continue to exploit debt concerns as they build a fascist mass movement — including a military draft and even more extreme worker “sacrifice” — all for the greater good of U.S imperialism.
Fascism represents the ultimate exploitation of workers. The income losses of millions of unemployed and the slashes in wages of tens of millions of those still employed are intensifying the exploitation of workers worldwide. It should be remembered that Germany’s Nazis supplemented their extermination camps with thousands of forced labor camps. Millions of Jews, communists, and others were commonly worked to death at mines, quarries, farms, factories, and construction sites. The free labor both shored up the German bosses’ profits and sustained their war effort.
Under capitalism, economic crises aren’t caused by debts or deficits. They reflect the contradictions of a profit-driven system that can never meet workers’ needs. That’s why we must fight for a world run by workers for the working class, not for the bankrolls of a few parasites on the top. Fight for a communist society for the working class led by PLP! Join us!J
Kochs Challenge Rockefellers; Workers Must Throw Them All Out
The Koch brothers, who finance the Tea Party and bash Obama, buy oil and manufactured products in many countries. They are heavily invested in industrialist accumulation in the U.S. but do not own a major bank nor do they profit from the huge U.S. war machine. However, they are also trying to establish a niche in their own special form of “imperialism on the cheap.”
The Kochs bankroll the Cato Foundation think-tank. Its Mid-East expert Leon Hadar thinks that the “ballooning deficit and an overstretched military leave Americans no choice but to make major cuts in defense spending by shrinking [the] U.S. role in the Middle East.” (Huffington Post, 7/5/11)
Hadar, no doubt smelling a potential supplier to Koch Oil, sees a deal with Teheran in the offing: “The United States should take part in any negotiations leading to regional agreements on Afghanistan and Iraq, a process that could also become an opportunity to improve the relationship with Iran.” (Cato Institute, 7/1/11) This, of course, runs counter to the interests of the Rockefeller-led, imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class which controls the largest chunk of Mid-East oil supplies.
Obama Fronts for Dominant Rockefeller Wing; Kochs Want Piece of the Action
The Koch brothers dream of catching up to the Rockefellers but the closest they’ve come to wielding state power is Tea Party obstructionism in Congress. They have a long way to go to match the Rockefellers’ long history of transforming their Standard Oil monopoly into a banking empire. Having trumped the J.P. Morgan clan by the 1930s, World War II left the Rockfellers heading up the biggest U.S. banks and therefore with the resources to supply the controlling capital in the U.S. war industry, putting them in position to shape U.S. foreign policy to protect their imperialist interests abroad.
During the Vietnam genocide of the 1960s and 1970s, James and David Rockefeller personally headed the ancestors of Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase. Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York and later became U.S. vice-president. David Rockefeller ran U.S. imperialism’s most influential policy foundry as president of the Council on Foreign Relations; its most influential university as president of Harvard’s overseers; and its most influential “philanthropies,” the various Rockefeller foundations.
The Koch brothers’ challenge to this mammoth empire puts them into a fierce dogfight with the world’s most powerful capitalists, a battle over who can exploit the most workers. The Rockefellers have been reaping super-profits from workers on five continents. The Koch brothers were behind the attack on Wisconsin’s state workers and teachers that cut their wages, benefits and bargaining rights. The only interest the working class has in this fight is to overthrow both sides with communist revolution.
Depression Intensifies Racism As Basis of Capitalist Super-profits
A Pew Research analysis (7/26/11) “shows the racial and ethnic impact of the economic meltdown, which ravaged housing values and sent unemployment soaring.” (AP, 7/26)
The net worth of black households in 2009 at $5,677 was one-twentieth of that of white households. For Latino households at $6,325 it was one-eighteenth.
From 2005 to 2009, Latino household net worth declined by 66%. Black household net worth shrank by 56% over that period. Much of this was due to their home equity losses, both from home foreclosures and plummeting home values, as well as double unemployment rates.
The Pew Research report also found that 35% of black households had zero or negative net worth. For Latino households it was 31%.
Said Roderick Harrison, former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau, “Typically in recessions, minorities suffer from being last hired and first fired. They are likely to lose jobs more rapidly at the beginning of a recession, and are far slower to gain jobs as the economy recovers.”
Across all groups, “the wealth gap between rich and poor widened. The share of wealth held by the top 10% of U.S. households increased from 49% in 2005 to 56% in 2009.”
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PLP Summer Project Backs: Strikers with ‘Mops and Stethoscopes’ Fighting U.S./Haitian Bosses
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- 05 August 2011 100 hits
PORT-AU-PRINCE, July 21 — “Haiti has a hardscrabble beauty,” an art historian said about its eroding slopes, its city streets turned into a huge informal market, its people always on the move in the daily scramble for food. However, Haiti, at the bottom rung of racist capitalism, has the beauty of workers struggling with their backs against the wall.
Workers at the University Hospital (HUEH) led off a strike with a demonstration at the Ministry of Health, for unpaid wages, decent health services for patients and working conditions for workers. Our PLP Summer Project medical clinic team spotted the demonstration and learned more from the local nurses working with us. The strikers are in the Syndicat des Travailleurs de Santé (STS — Health Workers’ Union), an industrial union whose logo combines a stethoscope with a mop.
Today we brought 50 students from our Project’s freedom school, and health workers and translators from our medical clinic to the sweltering STS union hall. We were given some of the few seats, fans were brought up, and they looked at us expectantly.
Charles, the head of their negotiating committee, explained the problems at HUEH, whose administrator lives in Canada and, with his cronies, gets paid in U.S. dollars. They have, in essence, destroyed the hospital.
Since the earthquake, labs, medicines, even food for the patients are missing or are allowed to deteriorate. Workers must find food for the patients themselves. The bosses allow patients to pile in without the means of caring for them. And workers being paid? Maybe.
As Charles said, these terrible services for patients occur alongside terrible working conditions for their caretakers, plus the stress of being unable to provide needed care.
The STS president Milot, a doctor, wrung his hands as he described the pain workers felt, prevented by the bosses’ system from using their strength, skills and creativity to treat other workers who need them so badly. He and Charles thanked us for our solidarity across the seas, his hands clutching the precious handful of $20 bills we donated to the fund.
Someone started a chant in English, “Same Enemy, Same Fight! Workers of the World Unite!” Our STS hosts took it up as best they could. Some of us lost our voices there today.
A Physician’s Assistant from the Bronx described his public hospital’s conditions as failing to improve over his 30 years of service, actually declining steadily over the last five years. A Dominican teacher, also from the Bronx, called for unity of workers on both sides of the bosses’ colonial border dividing Haiti from the Dominican Republic. A student from Mexico working here in our clinic added greetings from workers in Mexico.
We did the best we could with English and Spanish translated into French so a friend from Haiti could put it all into Kreyòl. We said we’d start a campaign of letters of support from the U.S. and elsewhere, and picket the Haitian consulate. It was, well, beautiful — and then we bumped our way home over the hardscrabble streets.
What is beauty? This recalls the common question among PLP’ers: “What is winning?” Workers’ struggle in and of itself is, as the Irish poet Yeats wrote, “a terrible beauty,” and nothing is uglier than the blank, depressed defeat of the dark night of the soul. But all reform struggle fades, slowly if it wins, and with a sad and terrible speed if it loses.
What our class needs in Haiti is a communist revolution. It cannot come a moment too soon, clearly seen as you watch a hungry child devour the bananes braisées from our Sunday picnic on a public beach as if they were sacred.
The revolutionary beauty our class needs must come from the strikers with mops and stethoscopes and from the anger of hungry children. It must come from their worldwide communist party. The truth of PLP’s ideas and the strength of its international organizing are the only adequate response to the racist crime that is Haiti today.
Send letters of strike support to Syndicat des Travailleurs de Santé, Siège Social HUEH, Rue Monseigneur Guilloux, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
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Training for Revolution Jewish and Arab Workers, Students Halt Racist Eviction
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- 05 August 2011 88 hits
RAMLA, PALESTINE, July 26 — After more than a month of struggle, the eviction warrant placed at the al-Aju family compound was finally revoked. This victory was met with celebration by family members, neighbors and activists — both Jewish and Arab, workers and students — who supported the struggle. This small victory and others like it are a signal, not that capitalism can serve the needs of workers, but that a united working class has tremendous power and that we are moving toward exerting that power in communist revolution.
This struggle has deep roots in the recent history of Palestine. In the 1948 war, the al-Aju family — originally Arabs from the nearby town of Lydda (Lod) — was deported from their homes by the Israeli military. However, unlike many other Palestinian refugees, the family managed to remain inside the so-called Green Line and has settled on the land of another Arab family that had been driven off its land by Israeli bosses. As its original owners were no longer present, the Israeli state took over the land, and managed it through the national housing company Amidar.
For over sixty years, the al-Aju family lived on the land as tenants, paying rent in full to the landlords, Amidar. The family’s men are municipal maintenance workers, working hard for a low wage; some, especially of the younger generation, couldn’t find a job at all. As apartments are rarely marketed to Arabs in Israel, the entire family had to build their homes on the same plot of land, with over 70 people, including dozens of children, living in that cramped space with minimal infrastructure.
However, this situation was not profitable for the Amidar bosses. Looking to sell this land off to a real-estate developer who would build upscale apartments, Amidar tried twice to evict the al-Aju family from its land, both in April and June-July of 2011. However, the family did not surrender to the racist court’s orders, and fought back.
Helping the al-Aju family was the Solidarity organization, a broad coalition of Jewish and Arab left-wing activists (mostly students and workers), ranging from liberals to anarchists to communists, who are fighting against the racism, apartheid and fascism of the Israeli regime. At the eviction date in April, Solidarity activists held a rally against Amidar and the cops, and managed to stop the eviction attempt.
In early July, the court issued a “flexible” warrant for a whole month, meaning that Amidar and the cops could evict the al-Aju family from its home, children included, with no notice. To defeat this, Solidarity — in which several PL’ers are active — organized shifts of volunteers to sit at the al-Aju compound, give support to the family, and quickly call in help from additional activists in case the Amidar thugs and the cops showed up.
On July 25th, a large rally was held near the al-Aju compound, where the family’s father said over the bullhorn that he will stay in his house no matter what, and that “the revolution starts from the al-Aju compound.” An activist leader said that the family would be evicted only over his dead body, and a PL’er made the point plainly: “a system that can’t provide everyone with a roof over their heads has to destroyed.”
On July 26th we achieved a victory when the District Court decided to revoke the eviction warrant until further notice. This action gives us a glimpse at the power of the working class, when we are united across boundaries. This was a great training session for what we will need to do to finally defeat the landlords, the cops and the racist courts.
We call it a training session because this victory, like all reform victories, has an expiration date. The bosses have the ultimate trump card, state power, that they use to undo the major and minor advances that the working class wins. The warrant was revoked “until further notice,” which means that this battle will have to be fought again. But all is not in vain: a family has a little more security in their home — no small thing! But perhaps more importantly, communist ideas have been injected into the struggle. The al-Aju family and Solidarity know that communism is not dead, that there is a Party focused on the day when we will graduate from fighting evictions to fighting against the system that throws working-class families out into the streets.
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‘Our Union’s in bed with the Bosses...’ Brookdale Rank-and-File Must Unite and Lead the Struggle
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- 05 August 2011 98 hits
BROOKLYN, N.Y., July 29 — “So what they’re talking about doing here is building a whole working-class movement, beyond our union,” stated one Brookdale worker to another at a home visit by PLP members. Despite torrential rain, we met to discuss the ongoing struggle at Brookdale Hospital, which foreshadows the even bigger racist cuts coming from the Obama-Tea Party circus, such as the $655 billion federal cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Brookdale Hospital and its 3,500 workers, in the majority black and Latino working-class Brownsville neighborhood have been stripped bare by the racist bosses of MediSys. The misleadership of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU — see previous CHALLENGE, 8/3).
Workers expressed their disappointment that the fight hasn’t escalated further, regardless of the militant sit-downs and picketing. “When we go outside now to march, we tell everybody in our department, ‘hey! You all should take your lunch break and come march with us!’“
After the previous months of struggle and confrontation between the workers and bosses, these workers didn’t hide their frustration with the declining militancy, and exasperation at how the hospital bosses are getting away scot-free. “We were telling the union for months what was going on here.” Another worker declared, “but they kept telling us to wait until the legal people did something.” The 1199 leaders are out for their own interests; it’s time to call upon new leadership, ourselves.
The MediSys-owned Peninsula Hospital, located in the borough of Queens, announced last week it is closing. This news was received with surprise and anxiety at Brookdale. The union Local 1199 leadership, is not only uninterested in fighting back at Brookdale, but uninterested in fighting back at all! Peninsula Hospital is closing due to the same series of attacks MediSys has made on Brookdale. Union leadership does not have the workers’ interests; as workers we need to unite and fight for our class interests.
A PL’er asked, “Why didn’t the union, which was aware of Peninsula’s troubles for months, organize any solidarity events between Brookdale, Peninsula, and every union member in the city with it’s 250,000 members?”
“Because our union’s in bed with the bosses!” shot back a worker.
PLP isn’t building some union or electoral party, but a fighting, revolutionary communist working-class party.
CHALLENGE, unlike all other media, is the working class’s paper and shows capitalism as the root cause of our current problems. Brookdale workers are learning that PLP is with them shoulder-to-shoulder. A major aspect of our struggle with the Brookdale workers has been trying to keep a long-term outlook. Strike or no strike, “win” or “lose” this round, the bosses’ racist class war rages on against the working class; the struggle continues.
Distribution of CHALLENGE to Brookdale workers, struggling with the workers over the ideas in the paper, making new friends, and uniting our lives through our struggles are the orders of the day. Communist revolution is necessary, and can happen as growing CHALLENGE networks make PLP’s ideas mass ideas.
STRASBOURG, FRANCE, July 7 — Exploiting the give-backs agreed to by the unions last year has spurred GM to further attack the workers at its plant here. This has sparked fierce resistance by the workers. The company claims union secretary and shop steward Roland Robert’s deafness makes him unable to perform work and wants to transfer him to a job over 800 yards away from the factory. But the independent occupational physician assigned to the plant says many jobs exist inside the plant which he could hold down.
In less than two days, 503 fellow workers signed a petition protesting GM’s attack. Yesterday evening, over 100 union reps attended a support meeting. The four trade unions at the plant jointly condemned “management’s maneuvers to isolate…Roland Robert from the shops.”
The Strasbourg GM workers are asking workers everywhere to send support messages to: CGT General Motors, 81 rue de la Rochelle, 67100 Strasbourg France.
GM’s aim is clear: to isolate a union leader, silence worker grievances and weaken the unions at a time when the company continues to envisage closing the plant. More broadly, GM is attacking union rights won through generations of struggle, but that’s the way capitalism works — the bosses, through their control of production and the state, eventually wipe out reforms won by workers’ past battles.
A continuing struggle against last year’s give-back agreement is the background for the enormous pressure on the workers to realize the company’s business plan. The company is pushing for 198 workers to take “voluntary retirement.” The 60 temporary workers in the plant are a constant reminder that nobody’s job is safe.
GM’s Strasbourg plant employs 1,040 workers who produce 270,000 gearboxes a year, half for GM and half for BMW. The average gross monthly wage is 1,800 euros (US$ 2,500).
On March 28, part of the GM workforce here struck against those working conditions and against the July 20, 2010 give-back agreement that resulted in the current wage freeze and abolition of the 35-hour week. (See CHALLENGE, Sept. 8, 2010) The strike was backed by the CGT union but opposed by the sellout CFDT trade union, which includes the majority of workers. The strike ended on March 31 with the CGT saying that “through our strike we have won…a written promise from management on an improvement in working conditions.” But that 2010 agreement on a wage freeze and ending the 35-hour week remains in force and GM’s “promises” are worthless.
GM’s attack on its workers here is one more proof that as long as bosses and their system with its drive for profits exists, workers will always be under the gun. Only a communist society run by and for the workers can end this exploitation.
