Copyright © 2005 by New International. Reprinted by permission.
 

As we enter 2005 the employers’ offensive, begun in the early 1980s, continues and intensifies. Pressing factory by factory, industry by industry, they have driven down workers’ wages, increased differentiation among wage earners, and diluted seniority. The bosses have intensified speedup, extended hours of work, and made pensions and medical care more expensive, less secure, and narrower in coverage. In doing so, they keep weakening the union movement.

At the same time, these “conquests” have not been enough to enable the employing class

• to push labor off center stage of politics in the United States;

• to break the spirit of vanguard workers in packinghouses, sewing shops, mines, and other workplaces where the capitalists have pressed their offensive the farthest for the longest time; or

• to reverse the sea change in working-class politics, marked by renewed rank-and-file resistance to antilabor assaults.…

To try to accomplish such goals, the capitalists must slash the social wage wrested from them by working people in the course of class battles beginning in the mid-1930s. These gains culminated in the great advances of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the extension of Social Security benefits, establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, and the addition of escalator clauses protecting retirement, medical, and disability benefits against inflation….

In face of the rulers’ mounting financial and economic vulnerability, the political and military challenges they confront worldwide, and the inevitable sharpening of class conflict these conditions entail, America’s propertied families and their political representatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties have become increasingly conscious of the need to use both the economic and the military power of U.S. imperialism. Gone is the illusion that the outcome of the Cold War in itself was a victory that would bring global stability under the domination of a Pax Americana, together with a cushion in state finances provided by a permanent “peace dividend.” The rulers sense—even if they do not see clearly or understand—the uncontrollable forces carrying them toward a future of sharpening crises, with its intertwined face of depression, war, and increasingly violent class battles with higher and higher stakes.

The frustration born of a vague but growing awareness of this vulnerability, combined with the inability to find a self-confident course to decisively surmount it (there is none), is the single greatest source of the deepening factionalism, demagogy, and degradation of political discourse—what can accurately be called its “pornographication”—that characterize all bourgeois politics in the United States, not only between but increasingly within the dominant ruling parties and their peripheries.

To prepare to defend their more and more crises-ridden global order, the U.S. rulers, led by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld with broad bipartisan backing, are carrying out the most profound transformation in Washington’s military policy, organization, and initiatives in more than half a century. No longer facing down massed Warsaw Pact troops and tank divisions across northern Europe, U.S. imperialism has begun implementing a fundamental shift in the strategy, global deployment, structure, and leadership of its armed forces.
 

A historic shift in the global deployment of U.S. imperialism’s armed forces, its military strategy, and its order of battle is being sharply accelerated. Championed by the White House and pushed forward by the Defense Department, this transformation aims at preparing for the character of the wars the imperialist rulers know they need to fight—at home as well as abroad. No substantial wing of either the Democratic or Republican parties has a strategic alternative to this course. And it is already too far advanced to be reversed.…

In seeking to accelerate transformation, the U.S. rulers are aggressively working to break through the conservative bias of the imperialist officer caste formed during the Cold War and marked especially by their political experience during the war in Vietnam. This determined push is sparking the most bitter factionalism within the officer corps of the armed forces—and of the intelligence services—since the opening years of the U.S. Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century. Many within the bureaucracies of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, and CIA stand to lose (or win) not only promotions but control over big resources. Never before have so many generals and intelligence officers gotten away with publishing so many politically partisan “tell it like it is” books in so short a period, often within a few months of resigning or retiring from active duty. They line up on one side or another in these turf wars and openly join the factional and electoral struggle for control of the executive and legislative branches of the government…
 

As U.S. finance capital wages war abroad, it is simultaneously advancing more and more openly on its front at home. Laying the groundwork for stepped-up militarization of civilian life, as needed, is central to their transformation….

The establishment of an armed forces command for the continental United States is combined with other, more publicized preparations to meet worker and farmer resistance at home. The capitalists deliberately drape these preparations in civilian, not military trappings. Like NORTHCOM, elements of such measures—dubbed “Homeland Defense” since 9/11, and centralized through a new civilian cabinet department of that name—were initiated by the Clinton administration. Avoiding the xenophobic Americanism the rulers will inevitably nurture among layers of the population as conditions of social crisis and broader war require, they present the preparatory steps they need to take today as matters of “civic duty” and as minor intrusions of privacy required of “us all” in face of “terrorists” imperiling hearth and home.

These measures range from increased federal centralization of “surveillance” of “suspected terrorists” both at home and abroad, to a de facto national identity card system in the guise of Social Security numbers; from omnipresent “security” controls at airports, in office buildings, and elsewhere, to appeals to report “suspicious” packages in public places or behavior that’s “out of the ordinary” in your apartment building, neighborhood, or on the streets; from curtailment of habeas corpus and even Fifth Amendment protections of the accused and spying on individuals’ library use, book purchases, and bank accounts, to stepped-up targeting of foreign-born residents, whether “legals” or “illegals.”  
 
 
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