Vol. 73/No. 7      February 23, 2009

Vanguard workers will start becoming more receptive to a communist program. As they go through more and more intense struggle, they will look for ways to fight effectively and win. They will be drawn to the ideas explained by fellow militants who are communists about how to strengthen the solidarity and combat capacity of the working class and our allies and, above all, our unions. We will win a broad hearing for the need to transform social security to encompass universal health care, universal lifetime education, universal workers’ compensation, and universal guaranteed retirement pensions. These, we explain, are not benefits “given” to the working class by the employers and their government; the new wealth produced by the labor of working people must be used to guarantee the conditions of a productive life—throughout life—for the working classes. We will find more success in countering efforts by the employing class to pit generations of working people against each other, or to divide and conquer on the basis of job status, skin color, sex, language, resident status, or national origin.

Much of our program makes sense to many working people when we explain it, but it doesn’t seem to flow out of a struggle they are engaged in that is central to their lives. It hasn’t seemed urgent or practical. And it won’t, so long as illusions persist about the long-term stability of the capitalist system, or, even more important, about the political incapacities and permanent acquiescence of toilers worldwide, of us. Many initially see our program as just a set of ideas, even a utopian projection, not a line of march through class combat toward the organized fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat. They haven’t gone through enough political combat under a proletarian leadership to develop confidence in their own and their class’s ability to organize and manage the economy and “guide the ship of state.”

We’ve all heard the same kinds of things for many years from many fellow workers and family members: “I’ll be taken care of by the VA.” “I’ve got a railroad pension, and it’s even ‘vested’ by a federal agency.” “I’ve been here twenty years. This is my retirement job.” Over the past decade or so, these old saws have been joined by: “I couldn’t live off my social security and company pension, but now we’ve made the company set us up a 401(k) and I’m putting aside a little more each month.” All these comfortable—and temporary—myths are encouraged by the class-collaborationist union officialdom, a petty-bourgeois layer with bourgeois values and aspirations, and ultimately thuggish self-centeredness.

Today, it’s not just the workweek and the work year that are being extended for the working class (paid vacation time and holidays are dwindling for millions of workers)—it’s the work life. The number of years the average worker in the United States spends as part of the labor force, which had been declining until the mid-1980s, has begun rising again over the past fifteen years. The official retirement age to receive full benefits under Social Security will be upped in stages starting in 2003, going from 65 to 67. And this is just for starters, as the rulers in coming years press their assaults against the social wage. This has nothing to do with bridging the generations and ensuring a lifetime of education and productive social labor for every human being, as we discuss in The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning. It has to do, instead, with a longer lifetime of exploitation to swell the profits of a boss. And with it come increased job-related injuries and workplace deaths. This would be the case even without speedup. And, as everyone here knows and feels, there is speedup, brutal speedup.

We presented central aspects of our program last year in a popular way in Cuba and the Coming American Revolution. We can use that book effectively as we talk socialism with young people and workers. Some of our clearest and more extensive presentations are to be found in the pioneering documents from the party’s turn to industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, contained in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, as well as throughout Capitalism’s World Disorder. In “Leading the Party into Industry,” for example—the February 1978 report that launched the turn—we explained how far the employing class, with help from the union officialdom, had gone during the post-World War II “summer,” a long upward segment in the curve of capitalist development, toward gutting the very foundations of working-class solidarity.

More and more “so-called general fringe benefits—pensions, health-care plans, supplemental unemployment benefits—all [became] contingent on the continuing profits of the boss you work for,” the 1978 report said. “We see this growing in industries like coal, steel, and auto. These benefits are not won for the class as a whole, or even a section of the class.” The report continued:

These fringes are good in good times—for workers who have them—because they’re a substantial addition to everything else industrial workers can count on. But when the squeeze comes, this all begins to fall apart. Your pension funds are threatened. Your health-care plans are dismantled. The supplemental unemployment benefits run out… .

This is the payoff when the debt of business unionism comes due. This is the price paid for the class-collaborationist policy of refusing to fight for the real needs of the class—the social security of the class, national health care, for national unemployment insurance that’s real and high enough, for a shorter workweek at no cut in pay, for protection against inflation, and for independent working-class political action. This is the price paid for a bureaucracy that says independent social and political struggles are secondary, and says the employers’ promises in the contract are decisive.

This is the payoff for the refusal of the bureaucracy to lead the labor movement to fight for the broad social needs of the working class and to build a political instrument to fight for them.

If you go back and take a look at the Teamsters series, for example, you’ll notice that Farrell [Dobbs] always talks about discrete, concrete periods within the depression and their political consequences, not simply about the “Great Depression.”
 
 
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