The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.40           November 11, 1996 
 
 
Fight Assault On Entitlements  

The U.S. government's reactionary assault on welfare, like the bipartisan drive against immigrant rights, is part of the ideological preparations to lay the groundwork for larger attacks on the hard-won entitlements of the working class. The big-business politicians scapegoat undocumented immigrants as "illegal" or rail against "welfare cheats" as a way to justify their reactionary policies.

The wealthy class seeks to create a pariah layer of unemployed workers who have been forced to rely on welfare benefits. They stigmatize them as the "underclass" in their ideological offensive - the "culture war" as ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan calls it - to deepen divisions among the working class and open the door to gut other entitlements.

The elimination of Aid for Families with Dependent Children, part of the Social Security Act of 1935, is the opening salvo in the wealthy class's frontal assault on these entitlements.

Leading up to the November 5 election day, prominent bourgeois spokespieces, such as the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, began political preparations for the deeper attacks William Jefferson Clinton will have to lead in his second White House term - going directly after Social Security and Medicare.

It's vital for working people to see the connections between the bosses' war on labor and their assaults on welfare and other social entitlements - unemployment insurance, workers compensation, and health coverage such as Medicaid and Medicare. The employers' attempt to gut the pension program of striking steelworkers at Wheeling-Pittsburgh is the other side of the ax they are using to chop welfare benefits.

The political conquests codified in the Social Security Act of 1935 were the beginning of an attempt to blunt the dog-eat- dog competition for jobs imposed on the working class under capitalism. It was an initial step by working people toward conquering the social organization of conditions necessary for life, such as education, housing, and health care.

These are programs that provide some possibility for workers to make it through a lifetime, to have pensions, to be able to provide care for the young, to be able to get an education. They are not "handouts," "giveaways," or the "dole." They are universal social rights -entitlements won by the working class, that are distributed out of what that class - and only that class - produces.

The rulers have designed the "welfare" system to humiliate and marginalize jobless workers forced to rely on it. "Workfare" at substandard wages and other measures in the new welfare law will only make this aspect of it worse. The historic drive of the labor movement was always to fight for the extension of Social Security and other non-means tested measures that are entitlements for all. The labor movement today needs to lead the way in fighting for jobs for all, unemployment compensation at union-scale pay for as long as a worker is jobless, and other such measures.

This is the only way for the working class to defend itself from what lies ahead under capitalism - more homeless children, starvation for millions, and scapegoating of the victims of the capitalist economic crisis. The rulers are moving to curtail our democratic rights and will attempt to terrorize working people into submission. But they will face resistance to their efforts to impose these anti-working-class policies.

That's why labor battles, like those by striking workers at General Motors and the 1.6 million public workers in France who waged a one-day strike against their government's austerity drive, must be linked to the worldwide struggles of working people for jobs and relief from the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis. International working-class leadership can be forged from these fights that can lead a revolutionary struggle to overthrow this rotten system and build workers and farmer governments that will begin to create a new society without racism, exploitation, and the other degrading conditions intrinsic to capitalism.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home