Gore and Bush [the main contenders in the 2000 U.S. presidential elections] present slightly different views as to how individuals from the middle class or better-off layers of working people can realize a superior return on retirement nest eggs used for speculation in stocks and bonds. Both the Democrats and Republicans, with different emphases, advocate private savings accounts for those individuals who can afford them, plus, in some combination, reduced pension benefits, increased employee taxation, and an older retirement age.

In contrast, class-conscious workers and labor and farm militants approach Social Security as a matter of social solidarity. The toiling majority in city and countryside, whose labor transforms nature and in the process produces all wealth, have a right to a social wage, not just an individual wage. We have a right to lifetime health care, disability compensation, and a secure retirement. These measures are for all, and thus in the interests of all. We fight to push back the omnipresent “devil take the hindmost” assumptions pervading bourgeois society in order to establish collaborative working-class space—a place for confidence-building.

—Jack Barnes, July 2000

Written more than four years ago as part of the introduction to the pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform under Capitalism, this description by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes remains accurate and very relevant today.

The drive now led by the Bush administration to “reform” Social Security has its roots in the decades-long stagnation and decline of the rate of industrial profits. In their effort to shore up their profit rates, the employers have been unable to count on anything other than pressing to drive down wages and benefits, lengthening hours, and intensifying labor.

In the past, only in face of a social crisis triggered by depression and war have the capitalists been able to mobilize patriotic appeals for “national unity” and “equality of sacrifice” that can convince broad sections of the population, at least for a time, to accept sweeping cuts in their living standards. It will take such circumstances again for the rulers to mobilize a nationwide campaign that attempts to roll back wages and conditions further and to substantially reduce the social wage—which the ruling class agrees they need to do.

Above all, the rulers must radically lower expectations bred over the last 30 years by gains wrested from their hands during the 1960s and early ’70s that transformed Social Security into a modest but real inflation-protected pension to live on and medical coverage to fall back on. When Social Security pensions were first won by workers in the course of labor battles in the late 1930s, the monthly payments were at best a small supplement to individual family support and church and county charity.

Today, with life expectancy 12 years above the age at which most become eligible for full Social Security benefits, the bosses are scrambling to find ways to re-appropriate more and more of even this small portion of the wealth workers create through our labor—a portion the capitalists never intended for us to have. As jobs and earnings have become increasingly insecure, however, millions believe they need a retirement income and emergency medical protection that are less vulnerable to risk, not more. So, despite its need to slash these entitlements, the capitalist class recoils from the kind of social and political fight they know they’ll be picking if they attempt anything more than relatively small takeback “reforms” around the edges at this time. This is what the reaction to Bush’s proposals among politicians from both parties of American imperialism is all about.

For more than 25 years, both Republican and Democratic politicians have escalated demagogic claims that Social Security is “going broke.” They imply that blame falls on growing numbers of “greedy geezers” who save too little, retire too early, and live too long. As far back as 1982, Democrats and Republicans joined together to raise the Social Security eligibility age, currently heading to 67, and hike the payroll tax—the most regressive and anti-working class of all taxes. In addition, despite the myth that the funds from these payroll taxes are isolated from general tax revenues in a “trust fund,” they are in fact used by Washington year in and year out to fight its wars and prop up the dollar. One of the unspoken consequences of this practice is to subsidize massively inflated bourgeois consumption.

The ruling class is aided in this campaign by the record of the AFL-CIO tops. Many workers don’t see today how they can defend or fight to expand Social Security or are taken in by Bush’s arguments and those of other politicians. One of the reasons stems from the refusal of the labor officialdom to fight for entitlements that cover the entire working class—like federally guaranteed health care for all—during the post-World War II boom. The union tops concentrated instead on getting “fringe benefits” in contracts with individual employers. Recently, however, large corporations—from United Airlines to Horizon Natural Resources—have torn up contracts and dropped pension plans or medical coverage for retirees. These facts show millions that the bosses can cut fringe benefits with a stroke of a pen in the absence of a fight by the labor movement.

The Bush administration proposals to “reform” Social Security and Medicare by legislating individual pension and health-care accounts are laying the groundwork for the ruling class to slash the social wage once capitalists feel objective conditions are ripe. The Democratic “opposition” puts forward various nostrums that will result in largely the same thing: lowered pension benefits and higher retirement age. Working people should say no to each one of these proposals.
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. rulers campaign for cuts in social wage
In national tour, Bush seeks support for Social Security ‘reform’  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home