The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.30           September 2, 1996 
 
 
Clinton Opens Bipartisan Attack On Social Security Dole-Kemp posture as `pro-growth' alternative'  

BY MARTÍN KOPPEL AND STEVE CLARK
Leading the bipartisan assault against a half century of social gains by working people, President William Clinton announced July 31 that he will sign the new "welfare reform" bill adopted by the U.S. Congress. By eliminating federally guaranteed Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and cutting off food stamps and Medicaid to many working people, Clinton is opening the battle to take back concessions codified in the Social Security Act, which was pushed through Congress in 1935 under the pressure of rising labor struggles.

In early August, Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole declared Jack Kemp his running mate, sounding a campaign theme of "economic growth" as an alternative to Clinton's "status quo" at a time of persistent job insecurity, declining real wages, and growing and unconcealable social inequality.

"Slow growth is America's number one economic problem," declared a Dole campaign memorandum issued a few days before the Kemp announcement was made. "America desperately needs new pro- growth policies to raise wages and secure the incomes of workers, now and in the next century."

The Republican ticket also paraded Blacks and women to the podium at its San Diego convention, which was held August 12-15. The opening night featured a keynote speech by retired general Colin Powell. "You all know that I believe in a woman's right to choose and I strongly support affirmative action," Powell told the delegates, the big majority of whom militantly oppose those democratic and civil rights. "And, I was invited here by my party to share my views with you because we are a big enough party...to disagree on individual issues and still work together for our common goal: restoring the American Dream."

Meanwhile, the "antiterrorist" campaign by U.S. big business and its government around the July 17 crash of TWA Flight 800 is fizzling. With more and more of the Boeing 747 and its contents recovered, aviation officials and the FBI still have not produced a shred of evidence pointing to anything but the likelihood of a disaster caused by mechanical failure. The threat to public safety from the cumulative effects of corporate cutbacks in the most basic upkeep and unremitting pressure on job conditions is becoming clearer to millions.

Each of these recent developments illustrates the devastating consequences for working people of world capitalism's depression conditions and the sharpening, profit-driven competition of the propertied ruling classes in the United States and other imperialist countries. They reveal the narrowing economic limits the U.S. rulers and their government confront in seeking to reverse this crisis. These events also underscore the political barriers the capitalists still face in seeking to roll back the democratic rights and social solidarity conquered in hard-fought battles by workers, Blacks, women, and others among the exploited and oppressed. Clinton opens assault on social security

At a July 31 press conference announcing he would sign the "welfare reform" bill, Clinton reminded the liberals in his party -and his colleagues in ruling-class circles -that he had been advocating the end of welfare "a long time before it became a cause célebre in Washington."

The new White House-approved law will end the federal guarantees of cash assistance for children of working people with very low incomes. Instead, Washington will provide state governments with annual "lump sums," to be distributed as state and local politicians see fit until the trough runs dry. The bill sailed through the House of Representatives by a bipartisan 328-101 vote, and through the Senate by a 78-21 margin.

The law puts a five-year lifetime limit on receiving welfare and cuts off benefits to those who can't find an employer to hire them within two years. It permits states to impose tighter eligibility requirements and force recipients onto degrading make-work projects often paying below the minimum wage. It singles out for special punishment women living alone with children, if they are jobless or under the age of 18 - all in the name of "curbing illegitimacy" and promoting "family values."

The law will affect most of the 13 million workers and farmers receiving welfare and the 25 million receiving food stamps. An estimated 1 million immigrants with residence papers will be cut off from food stamps. And hundreds of thousands will be excluded from Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), regardless of the wages they are bringing home from a boss.

Working people won the concessions included in the Social Security Act - which encompassed guaranteed pension, disability, and unemployment benefit floors, as well as AFDC - through hard-fought battles in the 1930s. In the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, these gains were consolidated and extended by the addition of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and cost-of-living protections. Workers fought for such minimal lifetime security to keep their class from being torn apart by the ravages of capitalism.The working class struggled to entrench these measures as universal social rights, with automatic funding not reviewed in annual budgets, and without any degrading "means testing." Far from being "the dole," these entitlements represent a small part of the social wealth that the working class, and only the working class, produces through its labor. These benefits are a social wage that, together with hourly wages paid directly by employers, make up the basic living standards of working people. Very broad sections of the middle class depend on them as well.

The rulers' assault on welfare aims to scapegoat sections of the toilers and undermine class solidarity, paving the way for more sweeping assaults. The day after Clinton said he would sign the bill, the editors of the Wall Street Journal exulted, "We hope that reform of the welfare entitlements will be followed by reform of middle-class entitlements" - their code words for slashing Social Security pensions and Medicare, and pushing off the legal retirement age for workers who have toiled a lifetime.

This bipartisan direction was pointed to in the Senate debate on the welfare bill by New York Democrat Daniel Moynihan. While himself a longtime propagandist of the reactionary notion that families headed by single Black mothers are responsible for the "culture of poverty" and "cycle of dependency," Moynihan was one of the handful of senators who voted against the bill. Moynihan called it "the first step in dismantling the social contract that has been in place in the United States since at least the 1930's. Do not doubt that Social Security itself, which is to say insured retirement benefits, will be next. [The 1935 act pledged to] care for the elderly, the unemployed, the children. Drop the latter; watch the others fall."

Moynihan and some other bourgeois figures recognize that in pressing this assault against the social wage, the rulers are taking a chance on suddenly facing a social explosion that can burst beyond the control of the labor officialdom and middle- class leaderships of Black and women's rights organizations. When that begins to happen, the monopoly by the employing class on politics in the United States will start being threatened as well. Socialist conference

Through the presentations and discussions at an international socialist conference held in early July in Oberlin, Ohio, communist workers and youth from North America and many other countries were well-prepared to respond to the political developments described above. Some 600 people attended the gathering, which was jointly hosted by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists.

In his talk at the conference, entitled "Capitalism's World Disorder: the Struggle for a Proletarian Party Today," SWP national secretary Jack Barnes debunked the claim by many liberals and middle-class radicals "that Clinton is being dragged to the right by Newton Gingrich and the `Gang of 73' Republican freshmen elected to Congress in 1994."

Barnes reminded participants at the socialist conference that Clinton's 1992 pledge "to end welfare as we know it" was not just campaign rhetoric. It was an extension of the "welfare reform" Clinton had carried out as governor of Arkansas in the 1980s and early 1990s. And it was the course he had charted as head of the Democratic Leadership Council and National Governors Conference during his rise as a bourgeois politician.

Back in November 1992, just a few days after Clinton's election, Barnes had explained to a public meeting in New York City that the Democratic candidate's entire campaign - since the first primaries - had been designed to assure the billionaire bondholders in the United States of his commitment to begin rolling back the social wage won through the labor struggles of the 1930s and civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s.

The coarsening rhetoric across the bourgeois political spectrum - aimed at heightening resentment in the middle classes and undercutting social solidarity among working people - would continue over the next four years and beyond, Barnes had explained. That 1992 talk is one of four collected in the forthcoming book, Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics in the 21st Century, scheduled for publication by Pathfinder Press this fall.

While governor of Arkansas, Clinton gained a reputation as a voice for the capitalist insurance giants, Barnes explained at the recent socialist conference. During his first two years in the White House, Clinton - in the name of "health care reform" - pushed unsuccessfully for legislation that would have been a boon to the insurance companies and to the increasingly profitable capitalist enterprises known as Health Maintenance Organizations.

Barnes said that Clinton had already begun to probe something Ronald Reagan had explicitly rejected doing only a decade earlier, anticipating the explosive reaction not only among workers but many in the middle class. Where Reagan still feared to tread, however, Clinton has now begun the slow but sure assault on Social Security retirement pensions as a universal entitlement.

Barnes called attention to the stingy increase in the federal minimum wage the White House and Congress were in the final stages of negotiating. That 90-cent increase to $5.15 an hour, stretched out over a full year, will leave the minimum wage in real terms almost $2 an hour below its level in 1968.

A few weeks later the House of Representatives approved a "health insurance" reform that Clinton has pledged to sign. By mandating the establishment of so-called private medical savings accounts, it opens a wedge to begin gutting Medicare as a government-funded entitlement for all. Pressure on democratic rights

The Democratic administration has been in the forefront of probes against democratic rights as well, Barnes told conference participants.

"When you hear the name `William Jefferson Clinton,' " he said, "you should always recall the name `Ricky Ray Rector.' During the 1992 Democratic primary race, Clinton demonstratively flew back to Arkansas from his campaign tour to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally disabled man on death row. That calculated move was part of sounding the note that the Clinton White House would be a `law and order' administration - an administration that went after human solidarity, despite its sentimental homilies. And that is exactly the course Clinton has been putting in place over the past three and a half years."

The administration's "anticrime" and "antiterrorism" bills have expanded the use of the death penalty; narrowed the right of appeal of the convicted, especially those on death row; and pushed back freedom from illegal search and seizure further than other recent administrations even dreamed of doing.

In April, the SWP leader pointed out, Clinton signed legislation mandating the government to deport immigrants previously convicted of a felony or misdemeanor without due process. In May he signed a nationwide "Megan's Law," which requires states to publicize the names of persons convicted of a sex offense after their release from prison, in effect adding years to their sentences without the right to a trial or jury.

Barnes likewise condemned Clinton's announced plans to sign the reactionary Defense of Marriage Act currently before Congress, which bans same-sex marriages by gays and lesbians. This is not just a case of flagrant intrusion by the state into people's private lives, Barnes said.

"The majority of workers and youth, who haven't been hardened by the bourgeoisie's efforts to coarsen politics, don't need many arguments to react with hatred when the state reaches in to touch your heart and damage it, and to do so in a way that stigmatizes and sets you apart from other human beings. That says more than most things you can think of about the rulers' utter lack of human solidarity.

"What's more," the socialist leader added, "Clinton's pledge to sign this reactionary legislation says a lot about the utter cynicism of bourgeois campaign promises. In 1992 Clinton campaigned as a supporter of gay rights, in the military and civilian society. His record ever since tells a different story."

Barnes recalled that for his generation of youth, a similar issue had been the so-called miscegenation laws in some 19 states that barred marriages between a white person and a Black person. Under the impact of the mass civil rights battles, those laws were finally struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court only in 1967. Republicans pose as party of `growth'

Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole gave Clinton a tongue-in-cheek commendation in early August "for finally climbing on board the Dole welfare reform proposal." In truth, however, the Dole campaign is taking advantage of Clinton's identification among growing layers of working people and the middle class as the candidate of economic stagnation and social austerity, the candidate of the "balanced budget" at all costs.

Both Clinton's record and his campaign rhetoric are placing his economic and social policy in some fundamental ways to the right of the Dole campaign propaganda. The White House and its apologists are campaigning for Clinton's re-election by trying to depict his first term as the best of times. They are trying to convince workers that less than 2 percent annual economic growth so far in the 1990s - compared to more than 4 percent in the 1960s, above 3 percent in the 1970s, and more than 2.5 percent even in the 1980s - is about all that can be expected "in these difficult times." And they want us to believe that 5-6 percent unemployment - considered high even during recessions until the mid-1970s - is really "full employment" today.

Clinton, in an interview published in the August 1 Wall Street Journal, acknowledged that "we would be better off if we could grow a little faster.... But the truth is," he cautioned, "no one knows what the optimum rate of economic growth without inflation is."

To millions of working people and layers of the middle class, however, today's stagnant growth, high jobless levels, declining real wages, and increasing class inequality - all during an upturn in the capitalist business cycle - represent a growing danger to their economic and social prospects. If this is the best capitalism has to offer for the foreseeable future, more and more people are beginning to say, then the consequences for the lives and livelihoods of the working class will be devastating.

In selecting Jack Kemp as his running mate, Dole consciously chose a candidate whose longtime rhetoric - including as a U.S. Congressman and Bush administration cabinet member - has won him the reputation in bourgeois politics as "pro-growth," not a "budget deficit hawk."

"America needs more economic growth, more economic opportunity, more jobs, with rising incomes at home and leadership and cultural renewal for America in the world," Kemp said on his arrival in San Diego for the Republican convention August 11. "Here's what a Bob Dole White House will mean to you and your families: more money in your pockets and your savings account. More jobs in your community.... We want a net of welfare and safety under which people should not be allowed to fall. But we are going to work on building a ladder of opportunity upon which every American can climb."

Dole's recent call for a 15 percent tax cut, in and of itself, is not the heart of the pitch the Republican campaign hopes to ride all the way to the White House this summer and fall. Not to mention the even more regressive flat tax and drastically deflationary return to the gold standard, with which Kemp had been associated prior to accepting the spot on the Republican ticket. Such tax schemes and monetary nostrums - while holding a certain appeal for small businesspeople and some middle-class sectors and working farmers - are of much less interest to broad layers of workers.

Of much greater interest to workers, and to many in the middle class as well, however, is some prospect of accelerated economic growth and what they assume will be an accompanying increase in jobs, weekly pay, and a sustainable social wage for all. Why are workers on welfare suffering? Why is anxiety mounting over Medicare and Social Security payments in the decades ahead? Because economic growth is too slow to sustain such benefits, the Republican candidates are demagogically saying to working people.

Dole's propaganda also shovels six more feet of earth on the more draconian sections of the "Contract with America" - the drastic social cuts House speaker Gingrich and the Republican majority failed to push through Congress in 1995. The Contract had already been laid to rest much earlier in the presidential campaign. It was absent from the Republican convention speeches.

The Dole-Kemp campaign now intends to leave the incumbent Democratic administration holding the bag for attacks on entitlements. As a recent New York Times article put it, Kemp, "while not opposed to fiscal austerity, has always argued that balancing the budget should not be the `be-all and end-all.' " And campaigning August 12 at the Solar Turbines Inc. factory in San Diego, Dole plugged his running mate and vowed to the workers, "We're not going to touch your Social Security." Buchanan's Lenten truce

The steps by the Dole campaign culminating in the San Diego convention also register the obstacles the U.S. rulers as a whole face in seeking to push back the democratic rights and social gains working people and the oppressed have fought to defend and extend over the past quarter century.

In its big majority, the U.S. employing class is convinced that Patrick Buchanan's ultrarightist campaign for the Republican nomination is too far out ahead of the times. Buchanan's main goal was, and remains, to build the nucleus of an ideologically reactionary "America First" movement through the campaign - one with a fascist cadre integrated into it.

"The bourgeoisie itself places sharp limits on rightist forces as long as the social crisis is not so deep that it must rely on them to maintain capitalist rule," SWP national secretary Jack Barnes explained in a 1995 New Year's weekend talk in Los Angeles, also to be included in the forthcoming book, Capitalism's World Disorder. Under such circumstances, Barnes said, the rulers push back against movements like Buchanan's, which rock the stability of the capitalist two-party system.

Buchanan's xenophobic, and increasingly anticapitalist, appeals were pitched during this year's campaign, as they had been four years ago, to the insecurities and fears of the middle class and layers of the working class.

The ultrarightist's campaign peaked shortly after his victory in the New Hampshire primary in mid-February, however. At the end of that month, Buchanan took third place in the Arizona primary, losing to candidate Malcolm Forbes Jr. Forbes won that race by hammering on the question of reversing economic stagnation, as the Dole-Kemp ticket is trying to do today. Kemp backed Forbes, not Dole, in the primaries. And, as with Dole's current tax cut proposal, Forbes's flat tax actually took a back seat in the minds of most voters to the broader logic of his growth rhetoric.

It was also during the Arizona primary that Buchanan began to encounter both public protests and growing revulsion among broad layers of workers and youth to his openly anti-immigrant and thinly veiled racist and anti-Semitic demagogy. Chicanos and others took to the streets to denounce him in Arizona, and other protests began to dog Buchanan's trail for the rest of the campaign.

As a capitalist politician, Kemp has actively cultivated the opposite public image. For example, he opposed Proposition 187, the anti-immigrant California ballot measure approved in 1994. Dubbing himself a "bleeding-heart conservative," Kemp also used his position as secretary of housing and urban development in the Bush administration to seek out photo opportunities in Black urban neighborhoods. Both in those years, and more recently as co-director of the bourgeois think tank Empower America, Kemp pushed what he called "enterprise zones" - that is, tax breaks and other incentives to businesses that located in Black and Latino neighborhoods, supposedly creating jobs.

The Republican convention officially adopted a platform portrayed by some in the big business press as a victory for Buchanan's forces there. Among other things, Dole had initially proposed that the plank calling for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion be accompanied by a "tolerance" clause welcoming those who support a woman's right to choose into the Republican campaign; that "big tent" clause was dropped. And the platform also included, for the first time, a plank calling for overturning the constitutional right to "birthright citizenship" for the children of immigrants.

Dole's convention staff, however, arranged for the platform to be discussed and adopted during afternoon off-hours, when there was little or no TV coverage of the gathering. Dole also demonstratively told a San Diego daily newspaper, "I'm not bound by the platform. I probably agree with most everything in it, but I haven't read it." Both Dole and Kemp disowned the citizenship plank.

At an August 11 convention-eve rally of his supporters in nearby Escondido, California, Buchanan conceded temporary defeat, ruling out for now a walkout from the Republican gathering to form a separate, ultrarightist party.

"In the Middle Ages," Buchanan said, "there was a time they called the Truce of God. During Lent, the warring nobles and knights suspended their battles with one another. No fighting during Lent....

"Let us - at least for the next 10 weeks - nobles and knights - and, yes, even the peasants with pitchforks - suspend our battles with one another and join together in common cause to defeat Bill Clinton and Prince Albert [Gore]," he declared.

In concluding his remarks, Buchanan directly addressed "the young of the Buchanan Brigades," the cadres of the incipient fascist movement he continues to work to build. "I know how you feel. We fought it fair. We almost had it won," Buchanan said. "So, now, yoúve had your first defeat. It's painful. But I know in my heart this cause is going to prevail. This cause is going to triumph, because it is the cause of America.... And, through my remaining days, it will be the proudest honor of my life to have led the Buchanan Brigades." Limits of "downsizing"

"More than at any previous time in the long decline of the curve of capitalist development since the mid-1970s," said Jack Barnes in his talk to the recent socialist conference, "it is becoming clear that the capitalist rulers have exhausted every alternative they've tried to reverse their declining rate of profit and open a new period - over several business cycles - of sustained economic growth."

Only a few years ago, he said, the bourgeois press and politicians were promoting the illusion that the collapse of Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and other workers states in Central and Eastern Europe would open vast new markets for capitalist investment and trade.

Just days after the June electoral victory of Boris Yeltsin in Russia's presidential election, however, Barnes said, the capitalists are "once again learning that answered prayers are often worse than unanswered prayers." The economic and political instability in Russia shows no signs of ebbing, he said.

Barnes's point was driven home in subsequent weeks by the stunning defeats dealt to Moscow's armed forces by the oppressed Chechen people. The U.S. rulers also fear the social and governmental crisis that could be sparked in Russia should the ailing Yeltsin suddenly die. And they are tactically divided over the potentially explosive political ramifications in Moscow of moves now afoot in NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries not far from Russia's borders, such as Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

From the NATO occupation of Yugoslavia to unstoppable political explosions in the Middle East; from devastating recessions in Mexico and Argentina to double-digit unemployment in Western Europe; from ongoing rebellions by Irish freedom fighters to a renewed popular upsurge against the military dictatorship in Indonesia - recurring crises and sharpening class conflict show that no part of today's world is immune to the consequences of capitalism's depression conditions.

The only way left for the employing class and its government to try to relaunch a prolonged capitalist expansion, Barnes said, "is to deepen their assault on the working class and labor movement, in the United States and worldwide. They have to qualitatively increase the rate of exploitation - lowering wages, slashing pension and other social security benefits, extending hours of work, and pushing back job conditions at the expense of the health and safety of workers and the public."

Since the mid-1980s, Barnes said, stiffening competition has forced the capitalists in the United States and other imperialist countries onto a course of cost-cutting - what they call "downsizing," or "re-engineering" - in order to take market share away from their rivals and try to boost their profit rate. They have used layoffs, speedup, wage cuts, and computerization of work processes to squeeze more profits out of fewer workers.

What has been shown by the continued slowdown in growth in recent years, Barnes said, is that these measures cannot ignite a self-sustaining increase in profit rates. "So-called downsizing is being exhausted," he said. "The pretense that computerization will raise what the bosses call `productivity,' or that capital accumulation can be reignited in the capitalist economy as a whole by laying off more and more workers and other employees, is coming to an end."

Barnes cited an article in the July 5 Wall Street Journal with the summary headline, "Going for growth: Many firms see gains of cost-cutting over, push to lift revenues; but they find expansion into new products risky; some set off price wars; pressures from Wall Street." The reporter quoted one Wall Street businessman as saying, "Boosting profits through downsizing was easy; all executives had to do was take the heat from layoffs." The article continued: "The questions now, he says, are whether executives skilled at cost-cutting are also skilled at revenue- raising, and even if they are, whether profit growth will be equally strong."

Barnes had explained the underlying reasons for this deflationary deceleration of capitalist growth in the 1995 New Year's weekend talk that will appear in the book Capitalism's World Disorder. "The one thing the capitalists are not doing, and are incapable of doing," he said in that earlier talk, "is expanding productive capacity to anywhere near the degree they need to fuel another gigantic boom, set industrial profits rates on a long-term upward course, and accelerate capital-sustained accumulation.

"Even as capitalists temporarily boost their returns by cutting costs and taking a bigger slice of market share away from their rivals, their long-run profit expectations are such that they are still not investing capital in new plant and equipment that draws more and more workers into expanded production.

"The money that is going into new equipment goes largely into computerization and other means to make us work faster to produce more with fewer co-workers," he said. "That alone does not and cannot expand productive capacity, however. It intensifies speedup and extends the workweek. But it does not create the basis for the rising profit rates and capital accumulation that marked the post-World War II capitalist boom until it began running out of steam by the early 1970s."

As the socialist conference was taking place in early July, the Wall Street stock market was in the midst of a two-month- long decline that underlined the volatility of the debt-driven world capitalist economy. Prices on the pieces of paper called stocks and bonds have soared in recent years, Barnes pointed out in his talk to the conference, but with no basis in proportionately increasing production of real values.

This expanding balloon of credit and other paper values, he said, remains another point of growing instability for the capitalist system - one that can be tipped over the edge by sudden economic shocks such as a bank collapse or disastrous crop failure, or by war drives, wars, and other catastrophic political crises.

The capitalists in the United States and other countries have been trying for several decades to postpone a head-on confrontation with the working class and labor movement, Barnes said. They know at some point they will meet growing labor resistance, and that the outcome will only be decided in the course of gigantic class battles. The bosses have seen the heat lightning of that resistance time and again when they have pressed too far, too fast against workers and their unions in the United States, as well as in the wave of strikes and mass workers protests that swept France in late November and December of last year.

"But the employing class today is increasingly running up against the reality that they cannot fundamentally alter the relations between capital and labor just by letting real wages continue to slowly but steadily decline and chipping away at the edges of the social wage won by the working class." Profit drive leads to disasters

The consequences for health and safety of the employers' profit drive have been graphically illustrated by the TWA air catastrophe. Corporate greed, not bombs, is the overwhelming source of the growing dangers of air travel - and all travel - the world over.

The government and big-business bomb (or surface-to-air missile) fraud is coming apart more each day. The lack of any contrary evidence increasingly indicates that the source of whatever happened to TWA 800 lies in the "downsizing" and "slimming" so proudly proclaimed by the owners of TWA (see news article by a TWA worker elsewhere in this issue). As a result, the efforts by the U.S. rulers and big-business press to stir up a "terrorism" scare have increasingly fallen flat.

When Clinton introduced "antiterrorist" legislation in Congress, Gingrich was able to posture as the defender of civil liberties of the U.S. people by organizing to vote down the White House proposal to increase government wiretapping powers.

The ValuJet crash near Miami and the engine explosion on a Delta plane during takeoff earlier this year are just two more recent examples of the rising toll and disasters waiting to happen that result from the airline companies' "cost-cutting" on maintenance - something the employers and capitalist media are trying their best to cover up. It is the cause of rail, ferry, automotive, and other industrial disasters both in the United States and elsewhere.

In the 1995 New Year's talk, Barnes explained that class- conscious workers must insist that the labor movement not be complicit in this profit-driven breakdown. "As conditions of work get worse, as hours, increase, as wages go down, there are a few workers who find themselves beginning to say: `I don't give a damn. It's not my job. Let somebody else take care of it. The devil take the hindmost.'

"The union officialdom's example in life encourages such cynicism among a few in the ranks. It is the other side of pulling together to help the fortunes of `our company,' " Barnes said.

"But class-conscious workers must take such questions as safety as seriously as their character deserves. Labor must convince broad layers of the population as a whole that it is the working-class movement above all that cares about these questions. We must be able to assert with complete confidence and integrity that the stronger, the more militant, and the more democratic the union, the safer the operations of the industry, whatever it may be. This is a fundamental matter of class pride, of self-respect, of the morale of the working class. It is a question of the working class taking the moral high ground in the battle against the exploiting class and for human solidarity." Feature Talks At Convention

Four major talks were presented at the international socialist conference referred to in the article above. Mary- Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder publishing and editor of the Marxist magazine New International, addressed the meeting on "Using, selling, and producing our books: Year one of the rectification process." She spoke about charting a course to help the communist movement respond in a timely way to new developments in politics, through getting books with the most powerful ideas on earth - the ideas of the revolutionary workers movement - into the hands of thousands of fighters around the world.

Jack Willey gave a presentation entitled "Building the Young Socialists and winning youth to the communist movement." Willey, who spoke on behalf of the Young Socialists national steering committee, said the YS reconfirmed its goal set at its national convention in April to double the size of its membership by the end of the election campaign.

"The changing face of U.S. politics" feature was presentation given by James Harris, a member of the party's National Trade Union Committee and the SWP candidate for U.S. president. In his talk Harris noted how the party has been able to elect a national trade union leadership body, for the first time in a decade, composed largely of SWP leaders working in industrial jobs.

The conference also included classes and workshops on a variety of political topics aimed at increasing the effective political work of communists and supporters of the revolutionary movement.  
 
 
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