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   Vol. 69/No. 19           May 16, 2005  
 
 
Defend, extend Social Security!
(editorial)
 
The more than 25-year-long stagnation and decline of the U.S. rulers’ profit rates is accelerating competition between imperialist powers and increasing the pressure to shift further to the bosses’ favor the relationship between capital and labor. In seeking to boost their profit margins, more and more employers have been unable to count on anything other than pressing to drive down wages and benefits, lengthening hours, and intensifying labor. This stretch-out and speedup is the “secret” to the productivity growth that figures in ruling circles like Alan Greenspan brag about. They do so to reassure the capitalist class that something more is happening than a further expansion of massive government debt and its private counterpart in corporate paper, mortgages, and credit cards.

The progress thus far by individual employers in increasing the rate of exploitation through assaults on wages, hours, and job conditions, however, falls far short of what the capitalists must accomplish. The U.S. ruling capitalists need to slash payouts for Social Security pensions and other components of the social wage. They must shift more of the cost of education, public transportation, care of the young and old, and other government-funded services onto individuals and their families, making them more dependent on the church and charities.

Above all, the rulers must radically alter expectations bred over the last three decades by gains wrested from their hands during the 1960s and early 1970s that transformed Social Security into a modest but real inflation-protected pension to live on and medical coverage to fall back on.

This is what U.S. president George Bush is leading for the ruling class with his tours across the country and his latest televised news conference.

When Social Security pensions were first won by workers in the course of labor battles in the mid-1930s, the monthly payments were at best a small supplement to individual family support and church and county charity. Average life expectancy in the United States at that time was six years below the retirement eligibility age, set at 65. From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, as a by-product of the mass proletarian struggle for Black rights, Social Security was significantly extended and strengthened. Benefits were indexed to inflation for the first time; Medicare was established for all those receiving Social Security; and Medicaid became available for those below a certain income level, and for many with physical disabilities, regardless of age.

Today life expectancy is 12 years—and rising—above the age at which most people become eligible for full Social Security benefits. The bosses are scrambling to devise ways to reappropriate more and more of even this small portion of the wealth workers create through our labor. Contrary to the assurances of liberal and radical “reformers,” the capitalists never intended that this portion of the wealth working people produce would be set aside for all time to provide a safety net for old age.

This is what the “crisis” of Social Security that Bush is trying to convince millions is knocking on everyone’s door is all about. But this argument is not new. For more than 25 years, both Republican and Democratic party politicians have escalated demagogic cries that Social Security is “going broke,” implying that blame falls on growing numbers of “greedy geezers” who save too little, retire too early, and live too long. As far back as 1983, Democratic and Republican politicians 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 these payroll tax funds are “put aside,” are isolated from the flow of general tax revenues, they are in fact used by Washington every year to fight its wars and prop up the dollar, which includes subsidizing massively inflated bourgeois consumption.

The problem the wealthy rulers face is that over decades, as both jobs and increases in real cash earnings have become more insecure, millions have come to believe they need a retirement income and emergency medical protection that are less vulnerable to risk (such as investments in the stock market or U.S. Treasury bonds), not more.

Only in face of a social crisis, however, triggered by depression and war has finance capital in the United States been able to mobilize the kind of 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 once again for the rulers to mobilize, on a national political plane, a campaign to roll back wages and conditions further and gut Social Security.

That’s the problem the Bush administration faces. 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 takeback “reforms” around the edges. Bush’s proposals—voluntary private pension accounts and undermining the universal character of cost-of-living adjustments for retirement benefits—are such changes aimed at softening the beaches for a more frontal assault on Social Security. All working people should oppose them vigorously.

Labor should call instead for defending and extending Social Security to cover universal, federally funded, lifetime health care for all.
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. gov’t faces uphill battle in drive against Social Security  
 
 
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