During Washington's carpet bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, U.S. military officials would often argue, "We had to destroy the village to save it."

That's essentially the argument put forward today by Democrats and Republicans alike, as they try to convince working people to accept cuts in Social Security and Medicare. These are social gains won for the entire working class as a by-product of mass political struggles that built the industrial unions in the 1930s, and brought down racist Jim Crow segregation in the late 1950s and 1960s. The two parties of big business do have tactical differences on how to reach the goal of cutting social entitlements, but they agree on the fundamental course and direction. Having exhausted other alternatives to reverse declining profit rates, the capitalist rulers are preparing a more direct assault on labor.

That's what the Boskin commission "finding" that the government exaggerates inflation is all about. It's a not- so-arcane way to push acceptance for cutting Social Security, and maybe do so without even having to pass a bill in Congress. Liberal Democrats have again taken the lead on this front, with Senator Daniel Moynihan popularizing many of the arguments of big business in the talk show circuit.

The argument that there isn't enough money for such "generous" Medicare and Social Security benefits - that the federal funds for these programs will go bankrupt if workers don't tighten their belts - is a fraud. Never in the history of humanity has there been more productive capacity in the world, more potential to provide every human being sufficient food, shelter, medical care, education, and other necessities. The crisis is not in the trust funds for entitlements but in the economic and social system, capitalism, which is run to maximize profits for an already wealthy minority and cannot turn those productive capacities to meeting the needs of the toiling majority.

In their drive to shore up profits, the employing class needs to cut workers' tiny share of what they produce -in other words reduce the value of their labor power. This is done both directly in the factories, through speed up and pay cuts, and also indirectly by attacking the social wage - what the working class has won as social entitlements that are not supposed to be reviewed under annual budgets.

The employers' war on labor is interlinked with the assault by the rulers on welfare and all sorts of public programs that provide income security for all.

As growing numbers of workers face fewer and fewer possibilities of getting jobs, even during economic upturns, the capitalists' attacks on social programs take a bigger toll. If workers' have bigger unemployment benefits and workers' compensation, when they get laid off they don't go out to look for any job the next morning. But the more these gains are eroded, the less confident working people become. It is much more likely they will rush out the door and take a job with significantly less pay. The capitalists succeed in lowering the value of workers' labor power as divisions and polarization within the working class increases.

The aim of the capitalists is to go after the solidarity of the working class; to make it appear that the conditions faced by the elderly, for example, are not the problem of the middle-aged or youth.

The most revealing explanations of what the bipartisan assault on Social Security is about are those made by some of the more forthright statisticians and economists. They say: when we passed Social Security we never expected to have to pay out most of it, because average life expectancy was lower than the retirement age. But now workers live 10 years longer than retirement age on average, and their ranks have multiplied. Won't you people face it that you don't deserve this generosity?

The capitalists would just as soon workers didn't exist before 13 years of age, and then die fast after retirement. The employers' class tries to pass off all responsibilities for caring for the young and the elderly to individual families.

Workers had and have a different view. For those on the assembly lines or the mine pits, Social Security was the beginning of the effort to moderate the divisions, the cutthroat competition, imposed on the working class -those who produce all the wealth - under capitalism. It was part of labor's struggle to gain and defend the right to live their entire life with some form of social and economic security, to begin looking at education, health care, and pensions as social rights for all.

From their class point of view, the owners of capital do face a genuine problem with the federal budget deficit and the growing national debt. But what's of interest to workers is how they try to solve it. One of the biggest causes of the growing deficit is interest payments to the holders of government bonds. The U.S. government bondholders are paid some $200 billion each year, or 15 percent of the federal budget, more than all government spending on education, transportation, housing, and what used to be food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But the payments to the wealthy bondholders are not being touched.

These are the billions of dollars capitalists already have that could be used not just to "save" Social Security but also raise the social wage and living standards of working people - the profits they squeeze from the fruits of our labor.

The "culture war" - including the scapegoating of immigrants and gays that accompanied the signing of the Welfare Reform Act and the Defense of Marriage Act this year - are at the heart of the assault on the social wage. The rulers' aim to find layers of the working class who suffer the most from these attacks and blame them for the social crisis of capitalism; point to them as an infection -as the Jews or foreigners were portrayed in the past. By blaming these workers, the bosses begin making conditions worse for all workers, as wages are driven down for the toilers as a whole.

Class-conscious workers have every interest in presenting the crisis unfolding in the world today not primarily as an economic and social matter but as the great political and moral crisis of our time. It's proof that only the working class has a chance to resolve this crisis and transform itself and society in the process in a truly human way. Only the working class has no interest in turning like dogs on the victims of a social system in terminal decline.

The only way to accomplish this once and for all is to overthrow the wages system and replace it with a socialist society. On this road, defending the gains registered in the Social Security Act and Medicare and Medicaid is an essential part of labor's battle.  
 
 
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