The following excerpts from Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, by Jack Barnes address some of the main trends in politics that are reflected in the recent events in France. The talk was given to a regional socialist educational conference held in Los Angeles over the 1994–95 New Year’s weekend. It is published under the title, "So Far from God, So Close to Orange County," referring to the financial meltdown in Mexico at the time and the declaration of bankruptcy by Orange County. Barnes is the Socialist Workers Party national secretary. Copyright © 1999 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY JACK BARNES  
How is the pattern of world politics we have been discussing reflected concretely in the class struggle in the United States today? What do workers and youth in this country confront, and what can we do about it?

Right after the 1992 presidential elections, a public meeting was organized in New York City in conjunction with a conference of the Socialist Workers Party’s National Committee and communist leaders from several other countries. At that public meeting, we said that what was most important about the bourgeoisie’s election campaign was the fact that it was not going to end with the counting of the ballots. "America First," the "culture war," building a wall along the border with Mexico--the themes of the ultrarightist Republican primary candidate Patrick Buchanan--continued to resound. The campaign of Ross Perot--who ended up getting 19 percent of the popular vote--and his demagogic appeal to an insecure middle class was not a fleeting phenomenon in bourgeois politics, irrespective of Perot himself. In the course of the 1992 campaign, Clinton had already begun speaking Perot’s language, probing measures to erode the social wage won through the labor struggles of the 1930s and civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s. The Democratic nominee campaigned on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it."

Across the bourgeois political spectrum, this coarsening rhetoric--aimed at heightening resentment in the middle classes and undercutting social solidarity among working people--continued after the election, as we said it would. Two years into the Clinton presidency and two months after the election of a Republican majority in the U.S. Congress, an ideological battle still rages within the bourgeoisie, packaged in demagogy directed to the broader population.

How should the capitalists operate politically in this new period of economic crisis and growing instability? Why are the employers still so far from accomplishing what they need to do, even after more than a decade of assaults on real wages, employment levels, job conditions, and working hours? How can they break through obstacles to take qualitatively more? How can the bourgeoisie start marshaling arguments that will enable them--even if ever so cautiously at first--to chip away more significantly at the assumptions underlying Social Security itself? These are among the questions at the center of bourgeois politics in the United States today.  
 
Rightward shift in bourgeois politics
The bipartisan framework of bourgeois politics continues to move to the right. What is the net result, for example, of a Democratic president coming into office and pledging to do something about national health care? Two years later, working people are further away from the socialization of medical coverage than before--further away. That is the reality. But the same direction is true across the board. There is a bipartisan movement to the right--and in some important respects a convergence--in the economic and social legislative agendas of both bourgeois parties.

Advancing along this trajectory inevitably breeds rightist demagogy, because the efforts by the Democratic and Republican politicians to rationalize their policies end up feeding reactionary biases, fears, and resentments. No matter how particular politicians try to package their anti-working-class moves, it is rightist views that are given the biggest impulse by the fact of these moves itself.
 

Capitalism over the past couple of decades has at least doubled the official jobless rate that is considered "natural" in the United States, Europe, and most other imperialist countries. The numbers of workers no longer even counted as part of the labor force still continues to grow. At the same time, the capitalists have reduced unemployment benefits, held down the minimum wage, diminished the buying power of take-home pay, denied government funding for child care, and allowed welfare benefits to fall further and further behind price increases. Working people are being driven out of affordable housing, and medical and retirement benefits are being cut.

This is what capitalism is imposing on growing numbers in the working class today. And then politicians from both parties start branding those forced to live under these conditions as outlaws. They start talking about putting the children of the "underclass" into orphanages. They start denying workers unemployment benefits or welfare unless we accept jobs at a minimum or subminimum wage. They draw immigrants across the border to exploit cheap labor and then begin organizing to deny them schooling, medical care, and social benefits.

In a long-term deflationary period such as we are living through today, the bourgeoisie does not even have to do anything for most of these conditions to worsen. It is not primarily a matter of government policies. Under such depression-marked circumstances, all the propertied families and their politicians have to do is let capitalism operate. As it does so, both economic and social conditions, and the relationship of class forces, shift against the workers and their allies....

During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, the bourgeoisie’s two-party setup already began to show its tendency to disintegrate around the edges under the pressures we have been describing. And this process will continue. The first manifestations will not necessarily be recognizably fascist. Perot, for instance, is a Bonapartist demagogue who presses a generally right-wing political agenda, but his movement does not have the incipient fascist thrust of what Buchanan is trying to put together....

This is how political radicalization begins, as evidence of political weakness and moral bankruptcy mount in capitalist politics. And we should remember that forces coming from different directions in bourgeois politics can and do converge around radical demagogy of this kind. Buchanan and Perot, for example, converge with those such as the so-called consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn to rail against the North American Free Trade Agreement--all of them speaking more or less openly in "America First" terms, while shedding crocodile tears over the conditions of Mexican workers and farmers.
 

As those struggles break out and develop--and we have no way of foreseeing the place or the timing--communist workers are not only going to be part of them from day one. They, as well as their party and their newspaper, are also going to be already known by many fellow fighters from having gone through earlier struggles together.

Unlike in the 1930s--during the last major capitalist crisis and rise of working-class battles and revolutionary opportunities in many countries--this time around it is not foreordained that the big majority of working-class fighters and youth attracted to revolutionary political conclusions will end up being misled into believing--and acting on the belief--that to be a communist is to be a Stalinist. That false consciousness, which facilitated either corrupting or demoralizing millions of revolutionists, became weaker in the second half of the 1950s following Moscow’s revelations of some of Stalin’s crimes. It was further weakened in the wake of rebellions by workers and youth in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. The Cuban revolution and its internationalist course dealt Stalinism even bigger blows. But the barrier nonetheless remained largely intact.

Today this poisonous confusion of a counterfeit of communism for the real thing can begin to be remedied. In the heat of coming class battles, the door will be open as it has not been since the early days of the Bolshevik-led Russian revolution to win the most revolutionary-oriented and self-sacrificing workers and youth to communism. They can be won to the scientific conclusion that the working class must get rid of a social system that relies on the monopoly of productive property by a tiny minority of ruling families who grow wealthy off the fruits of what the toiling majority produce with our labor. Revolutionists can and will be won to the only accurate conclusion from the experience of our class in this century--that unless we build proletarian parties and a communist world movement capable of leading workers and farmers to make a socialist revolution, capitalism will repeat its descent toward fascism and world war, and under even more horrible conditions than before....  
 
Nightmare of the capitalist class
The important thing is that without taking on the working class and our organizations in gigantic battles that we will have the opportunity to win, the exploiters cannot use their enormous military might to unleash a third imperialist world slaughter. Don’t fall for the rulers’ bluff. Long before such a war becomes possible, the capitalists must cow the workers and defeat us in struggle. They will ultimately finance and support growing rightist and fascist movements, because the capitalists cannot defeat the working class using "normal" methods. There will be massive street battles between fascist legions and the forces mobilized by the class-struggle-minded labor movement.

That is the nightmare for the world’s capitalist classes and their temporary political spokespersons--the Clintons, the Gingriches, the Majors, the Blairs, the Zedillos. In their big majority, they do not want to confront those class battles, because they are far from confident they can win. They try to put off the confrontations and finesse them. They buy off this or that middle-class layer in order to weaken our class organizations and try to con us into accepting more and more sacrifices for the good of the "nation."

But a point is always reached where working people can be conned no longer and struggles begin to mount. And with revolutionary leadership, forged and tested in coming struggles, the international working class has the numbers, the social power, the culture, the values, and the program to defeat the reactionary forces loosed by finance capital. We can organize victorious revolutions and open the construction of socialism on a world scale.

That is what we are preparing for. That is what is so important about political weapons such as the new issue of New International [no. 10] that we are celebrating here. That is why it is so important to get this magazine--along with the Militant, the Spanish-language Perspectiva Mundial, and our entire arsenal of revolutionary books and pamphlets published and distributed by Pathfinder--into the hands of workers and young people who are fighters and aspire to be revolutionists.
 

¹In November and December 1995, millions of workers and youth in France conducted another round of strikes and mobilizations against Paris’s austerity moves. The mass protests, backed by all three major union federations, succeeded in slowing down aspects of the government’s assault on jobs and retirement benefits of rail workers and other public employees. In the spring 1997 parliamentary elections, the Socialist and Communist parties won a majority and formed a new government, registering the rejection by workers and substantial layers of the middle class of the austerity course being pressed by the previous regime amid jobless levels exceeding 12 percent.

On May Day 1996 hundreds of thousands of unionists and other workers demonstrated in Mexico City against the austerity pact imposed by the Zedillo regime and agreed to by the progovernment officialdom of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). The CTM officials had called off all May Day activities and told workers to stay out of the streets.  
 
 
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