The Ontario government plans to raise class sizes, cut educational programs, and increase university tuition. In Germany, an impending recession is the pretext for demanding concessions from workers and pushing for privatization of public services. The Juppé government in France has not dropped its austerity drive against social security there. In Washington, as wrangling continues over a federal budget, the Clinton administration is steadily implementing cuts in social gains working people have won.
These governments are all acting on behalf of the capitalist rulers they represent by attempting to slash the social wage - entitlements such as medical care, social security, unemployment compensation, and others that the working class as a whole has won in struggle from the employing class. With their profit rates falling around the world, the bosses need to take back these gains as part of their attempt to shore up their system in crisis. The attacks on the social wage go hand in hand with the employers' direct attacks on workers' wages and conditions and their drive toward war to reconquer Yugoslavia and the other countries where capitalism has been overturned.
Cutting the social wage is not smooth sailing for the bosses and their servants in government, though, because the rulers are nervous about the response they can provoke among working people.
In the United States today, there is bipartisan agreement between the Democratic White House and Republican- dominated Congress to ax hundreds of billions from Medicare, welfare, and the rest of the social programs. There are real tactical disagreements among the rulers, however, which is why they have yet to pass a budget.
Some politicians, particularly House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the "freshman Republicans," favor a much faster pace, not just in dollar figures but in their ideological offensive against the working class. They aggressively argue that working people must sacrifice and give up their entitlements, that government has been "too good." They want to push harder to convince working people that immigrants, "welfare cheats," and other layers of our class are to blame for the economic and social crisis.
President Bill Clinton and the "moderates" in Congress are more cautious, and above all more hypocritical. They claim to be protecting working people, while they push through the deepest attacks on the social wage in decades.
Resistance by working people - like the massive mobilizations of workers in France in December, the rallies of U.S. federal workers at the start of January demanding to be able to work and be paid, and the current strike by 30,000 maintenance workers in New York - does make many among the bourgeoisie hesitate to push too fast right now, in fear of a social rebellion.
It's important for working people to fight back against every encroachment on our hard-won social wage - whether it comes from the Republican wolf or the Democratic fox. The value of each struggle lies not simply in what it can accomplish in holding back specific probes, but also in how the workers involved can gain self-confidence, common experience, and unity. These will be essential on the road to realizing that the only way to stop the bipartisan onslaught is to overthrow the dictatorship of the exploiters and replace it with the rule of the producers, the workers and farmers.