These pages describe the changing face of U.S. and world politics since the curve of capitalist development turned downward in the early 1970s after the long post-World War II economic expansion. An acceleration of that slide was signaled by the crash of the New York stock markets on October 19, 1987, the steepest one-day plunge this century. Literally overnight it became worldwide. By the opening years of the 1990s the capitalist system entered a worldwide depression. So long as capitalism exists, and despite ceaseless ups and downs of the business cycle, these depression conditions with their wearing deflationary bias will not be reversed unless the most powerful ruling classes in North America, Europe, and Asia and the Pacific are able to deal major defeats to the working class and labor movement and, through sharpening cutthroat competition and trade battles, destroy masses of commodities and capital. The inevitable companion of such an outcome would be devastating financial collapse, growing fascist movements, and world war.
Declining profit rates worldwide are intensifying capitalist competition for markets, sources of raw materials, and domination of low-wage "export platforms" in the semicolonial world. Many capitalists have slashed prices to the point of near-bankruptcy to push their rivals to the wall. In the United States beginning in the late 1980s, "downsizing" and "re-engineering" have become the code words under which the superrich owners of industry and the banks are waging a ruthless cost-cutting drive. They have been laying off middle managers, technicians, and office employees, as well as industrial workers; simplifying production and administrative routines through computerization; and shutting down obsolete plants and equipment and dumping less profitable divisions. They are restructuring production lines and imposing "just in time" inventory balances and delivery schedules of parts and raw materials-in the process making factories much more vulnerable to stoppages.
The capitalists are carrying out unremitting warfare-sometimes open, sometimes disguised-against the health and safety, the unionization, and the very humanity of the working class. The employers keep pushing to cut back wages and benefits. They are expanding overtime work, as well as part-time and "temporary" jobs with low income and no benefits. They are intensifying speedup, increasing differentiation among employees hired for the same jobs, and raising the eligibility age for pensions. The ruling families throughout the imperialist world are conducting a fierce assault on the social wage-the elementary, government- funded social security programs the working class has fought for and won in order to safeguard the class as a whole by protecting its most vulnerable members...
Bosses seek to divide workers
The capitalist rulers seek to free their hands to deepen
this anti-working-class offensive by chipping away at the
rights working people have conquered on and off the job.
Management seeks to restrict workers' right to act as
unionists and political people in the workplace and uses
"drug testing" and other ploys to victimize militants. The
employers and their government, seeking to weaken the unity
and striking power of the working class and labor movement,
try to roll back affirmative action gains won by Blacks,
women, and the unions. To curb the rebelliousness of young
workers and press them to conform to capitalist discipline
and values, the bosses target young people with "anticrime"
campaigns and more draconian punishments. The cops, courts,
and Congress crack down on the most fundamental rights of
both the accused and convicted.
Working farmers, capital's rural debt slaves, continue to face attacks on their right to a living income and on the viability of their efforts to till the soil to produce food and fiber. The rulers' drive to maintain profit rates multiplies their disregard for measures to protect the environment.
In the closing years of the twentieth century, the evolution of the capitalist crisis is giving new force to the conclusion of Karl Marx some 130 years ago that this exploitative system of production "simultaneously undermin[es] the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the worker."..
The capitalists and their spokespeople project onto the working class their own class-biased, self-serving, and self- deceiving notions about workers, who they in fact consider trash. To the employers, workers are simply objects-tools of a special kind to be used, used up, and then tossed as others are hired on. The bosses count on the corroding effects of the competition for jobs and divisions among working people bred by the market system and its dog-eat-dog values. They assume that the employed will never take up as their own the cause of the unemployed. The rulers believe that racism, discrimination against women, chauvinism against immigrants and workers in other countries, and generational conflicts will, in the final analysis, keep the working class and labor movement weak and divided. The capitalists are surprised when human solidarity-of which the working class is the bearer for the future of all humanity-comes together in explosive and unexpected resistance to assaults on the living standards, job conditions, and democratic and social rights of working people.
Young people who are coming into the factories and other workplaces today find themselves alongside workers from several previous generations. New hires can and do learn from these experienced workers about the blows that have been dealt to wages, working conditions, and the unions over the past two decades. These attacks are also detailed throughout this book.
But these setbacks and their consequences do not bear down on the young generation of workers as they do on those who waged a strike battle some years ago and lost...
Free from demoralization born of past setbacks and standoffs, and not yet "socialized" by more privileged layers in the plants, younger workers can explode into resistance regardless of moral lectures from preachers and pundits, rationalizations for givebacks by the labor officialdom, or promises by the capitalists and their government of what "we" can accomplish if "you" sacrifice just a little bit longer. In the process, many older workers will reach into their reserves and discover they too are different people than they thought they had become.
The key to new advances by the working class and labor movement will be the combination of hard-won experience from years of struggle and the combative freshness and initiative of young fighters...
Building parties of socialist workers
This book explains the kind of party the working class
needs in order to prepare for the coming class battles that
will decide whether humanity's future will be marked by
fascist tyranny and war, or by revolutionary victories by
working people over the horrors of a moribund capitalism and
the reconstruction of the world on new, socialist
foundations. If proletarian communist parties are not being
built long before the decisive battles are joined, it will
be too late; workers and their allies among the toiling
majority of humanity will go down to defeat.
From its origins in the mid-nineteenth century, the modern communist movement has put at the center of its efforts something new in human history: building parties whose leaders as well as members are, in their big majority, workers. With the worldwide expansion of capitalist industry in the twentieth century, communist parties-from the Bolsheviks under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, to the Socialist Workers Party of the United States and its cothinkers in communist organizations in other countries today-have worked to anchor their activity in the most strategically central and powerfully organized bastion of the working class, the industrial workers and their unions.