Now is the time for working people to protest the wealthy rulers' probes to privatize Social Security and gut other social entitlements. During the first week of December, the bosses' political servants claimed that the consumer price index overstates inflation, so cost-of- living raises in Social Security and other benefits are "too high." After seeing no response to this trial balloon, they floated the schemes of a biparitisan commission, set up by the Clinton administration, to map out deeper attacks on social entitlements.

This is a crucial question for the labor movement. It is the height of class collaboration for top union officials to participate in a commission whose purpose is to plan out how to tear up the social wage of the working class as a whole. Instead of brainstorming for a kinder, gentler scheme to shaft working people, labor needs to be mobilizing to defend these rights. These gains are the fruits of the blood and sweat from decades of struggle - of the mighty class battles in the 1930s and the gigantic civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s.

By placing a portion of Social Security funds on the stock market and into private retirement savings accounts - promoted in the plans pushed by Clinton's advisory council - the rulers aim to shift the burden of the capitalist crisis on to the family and break down solidarity among the toilers.

The crisis is not in the so-called Social Security trust fund, but in the declining profit margins of the capitalist class. In order to reverse the long-term decline in their average rate of profit, the employers need to increase the portion of value created by workers' labor that goes into their pockets, not ours. As part of this they need to get rid of "welfare as we know it," Social Security "as we know it," unemployment compensation, student grants, Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlements.

The bosses can only accomplish their aims by waging a direct assault on the industrial working class. Working people around the world are faced with the same probes by the capitalist rulers as those in the United States. In Europe, hundreds of thousands of workers have marched in the streets, waged strikes, and held other protest actions when the bosses tried to push similar austerity measures there. The corporate barons at the Daimler-Benz auto company and other employers in Germany were forced to back down after 100,000 workers hit the bricks when they tried to impose a 20 percent cut in sick-pay benefits.

This is an example for workers in the United States. It is only through resistance that we gain the collective strength to keep the wealthy class and their political servants, like Clinton, from throwing the elderly, the disabled, and millions of children onto the streets -and forge the unity needed to overturn their dog-eat-dog system.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home