BY JACK BARNES
The development of the Reform Party reflects the
polarization and growing panic among middle class layers as
social conditions of millions get worse. Rightist demagogues
like Ross Perot and Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura seek to
tap into this insecurity to salvage the decaying capitalist
system.
Below is an excerpt from a talk by Jack Barnes titled "Youth and the Communist Movement" that helps explain the stakes involved for working people in the emergence of these Bonapartist figures, which portends massive class battles. The talk was given at a meeting of the communist movement in Sheffield, England, in 1992. It is included in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. The book is copyright (c) 1999 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
The United States today is gripped by what bourgeois commentators consider a most peculiar phenomenon. Newspaper columnists, TV talk-show pundits, and academic "experts" talk about it more and more these days. They do not know what words to use to describe it - "a peculiar unease," "a mini- panic." Why, they ask, is unrest and insecurity mounting unevenly but seeming inexorably among so many millions of people?
But there is no mystery. For some fifteen years even before U.S. capitalism entered its current depression conditions, the experience of a growing majority of working people, and increasingly of worse-off middle-class layers as well, has been that economic and social conditions keep getting worse and worse. The conviction is deepening among millions that no one knows where it is all heading. Under these circumstances, small but significant sections of the population do feel panic. Many of them for the first time start looking for radical answers to the problems they face, problems they are convinced the two big-business parties have neither the will nor the capacity to resolve.
The most perceptive comment on the Perot candidacy in the major U.S. press was in the Wall Street Journal about ten days ago. You did not even need to read the article; the headline said it all. "Ross's Army: Meet Perot's Fans: They Crave Change, Not Specific Proposals." That was the main headline. The subhead continued: "They Span Political Spectrum, Shrug Off His Positions." That is, before Perot's backers began supporting him, they may have called themselves either a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal or a conservative or a moderate. But now they simply crave change, and they glory in his lack of specific proposals.
This is a mass psychology most of us have not seen in our political lifetimes - a widespread belief among layers of people that what is needed is not this or that particular solution, but a charismatic individual in high office who also has the will to impose change, whatever it may be. The conflicting class interests that underlie the rising social crisis get covered up in capitalist society; the fact that the mounting economic and social problems faced by millions are class questions is kept hidden. Nothing that happens in U.S. politics today openly takes the form of class politics.
Politically, fighting workers are the last remaining liberals in the United States today. As the bipartisan axis of social policy has kept shifting to the right over the past twenty years, most self-proclaimed liberals have become less and less liberals of the New Deal/Fair Deal variety. But fighting workers still talk like liberals, because it is the only politics they know. There is no politics except bourgeois politics in the United States on any mass level, and there has not been for decades.
We should never be fooled by this political reality into concluding that workers in the United States are somehow committed to bourgeois liberalism, however; they are not. Any more than we should be fooled into thinking that the working class here in Britain has moved to the right because many workers vote Conservative when the Tories promise lower taxes. No, it is just that as the Labour Party acts more and more openly as a bourgeois party, workers - if they go to the polls at all - vote under normal conditions for what they hope may at least improve their immediate situation. Both examples underline the absence of any genuinely independent political voice of the working class, either in the United States or the United Kingdom.
Nowhere in the world today, in fact, does the working class have a political voice powerful enough to be heard on any mass scale (with the exception of revolutionary Cuba, that is). Many organizations speak in the name of the working class - social democratic and Stalinist parties, centrist formations, union officialdoms. But none of them speaks for the interests of the working class. These voices pretending to speak for labor, pretending to speak for the traditions of socialism, actually speak as lieutenants of the capitalist rulers in decline, who are squeezing the working class.
This political misleadership, this lack of any clear working-class political alternative or program, tosses layers of workers into the same pot with hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, from the middle classes who find the radical solutions they are looking for among demagogic voices on the far right of bourgeois politics.
Space for politics in working class
Although workers place no independent class stamp on the
initial manifestations of this radicalization, opportunities
do start growing under these conditions for the working class
to begin to act in its own interests. These changes are
virtually invisible to those outside the working class,
however. Only from within the factories and the unions are
these changing opportunities evident. But this increasing
space to practice politics in the working class and labor
movement is the most important single political fact for the
communist movement today.
In the United States, this lesson was driven home to us once again recently by the explosion in the streets of Los Angeles after the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King. What was most striking, especially in the Los Angeles area itself, was that among workers on the job, there were no physical confrontations. The rulers were not able to whip up those kinds of divisions. Instead, in workplace after workplace, working people talked about these events, argued about them, and sometimes had heated disagreements. But workers with different viewpoints could say what they thought. This is the last thing anyone could have learned about from reading the race-baiting big-business press, however.
Communist workers had similar experiences during the Gulf War, as I mentioned earlier. But it is not just under these kinds of pressure-cooker conditions that we find space for politics in the working class. That is simply one of the payoffs for the work we do, day in and day out, talking socialism on the job with fellow workers and seeking to draw them into political discussions and activity.
The communist workers movement today has only one way to test whether our assessment of the political situation and what we are doing is right or wrong. It is not by polls or election results. The test for us is whether or not the space on the job and in the unions to discuss politics, to take initiatives, and to gain a hearing for the communist point of view stays open or begins to narrow in face of today's rising class tensions and polarization. If we are right, then that space will not close down, but will instead open up, with whatever ebbs and flows.
As workers begin finding ways to fight back against the capitalist offensive, as waves of strikes and other struggles begin to accelerate, this political space will expand. The bourgeoisie cannot simply take back this space, nor can the liberals, the Stalinists, the social democrats, or the union officialdom. This space within the working class and unions can only be taken back by the bosses and their labor lieutenants through class battles in which big defeats are inflicted on the working class. Each advance and victory by workers in these battles, on the other hand, will expand that space and strengthen the prospects for independent working- class political action and organization.
Cop brutality, racist assaults, frame-ups, attacks on workers' social wage and conditions on and off the job - these attacks go on here in the United Kingdom, in the United States, and across the capitalist world. But the resistance against these attacks and the politicization of working people through our collective efforts to push them back - this too grows. But anybody trying to follow politics just by reading the bourgeois press, or to engage in politics outside the branch and union fraction structures of a proletarian party, will never know what is happening in the working class.
Reaction cannot succeed without a fight
Given the shape world capitalism is in, the ruling
propertied families no longer have the option of postponing
the deepening conflicts engendered by their system with
social policies and concessions to broad layers of the
working class. They cannot adopt new legislation that
significantly expands the social wage and buffers class
tensions for an extended period of time. Their declining
profit rates and intensifying competition drive them in
exactly the opposite direction. There is only one way the
rulers can try to resolve the crisis of their social
system - by taking on the working class and labor movement in
battle and defeating us.
In periods of a great expansion of the world capitalist economy, such as the quarter century from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, the rulers promote a particular kind of social differentiation in the working class, economically and socially. On the basis of a real, even if modest, rise in the living standards of tens of millions of workers, the rulers maintain their domination short of a decisive fight. Wide disparities continue to exist in the working class, but the class-collaborationist labor officialdom is able to keep resistance in check by appealing to a broad enough layer whose conditions are slowing improving. That alternative is not open to the capitalists today, however, so the labor officialdom is less able than at any time in several decades to beg crumbs from the bosses' table.