The employing class prefers that workers die quickly once they're too old or sick to sell their labor power. For them it's a problem that workers live many years past retirement.

Social Security, which provides cash benefits to the elderly and disabled, is a piece of the social wage. It's a portion of the wealth that the toiling majority produces, which the working class has won from the bosses as a social right for all. Like direct wages, each increase in the social wage cuts into the profits the capitalists take from the value produced by workers' labor. That's why the employers and the politicians who represent them want to roll it back, and put more of the burden for care of the young, the old, and the disabled on individual families.

Making Social Security an entitlement - available to all - was also part of knitting working-class solidarity and undercutting the dog-eat-dog competition fostered by capitalism. That's precisely what individual accounts that can be gambled on Wall Street do: tear down the fabric of human solidarity workers have fought bloody battles to weave.

Like other social gains such as Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security was enacted as a result of the massive labor battles that forged the industrial unions in the United States in the 1930s, and later extended in the course of the struggle by Blacks for civil rights in the 1960s and '70s.

The U.S. rulers are hesitant to take on Social Security - which 44 million people depend on for most or all of their income - directly. They probe at ways to encroach on this entitlement, from raising the retirement age to floating various "privatization" and means-testing schemes.

By criticizing the most extreme "privatization" proposals, the Democratic president tries to pose as a defender of Social Security. But the course of the Clinton administration has been to consistently set the stage for greater inroads into the social wage. He promotes the myth that there's "just not enough money to go around" and brags about "ending welfare as we know it," referring to his signature on legislation that ended Aid for Families with Dependent Children, a piece of the 1935 Social Security Act.

Fighting to defend and extend social entitlements is part of defending the social protections needed to hold the working class together in face of economic crises and the divisions promoted by the bosses. The entire labor movement should join in exposing Clinton's attack on Social Security and organize to defeat it.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home