The selection below is from "Capitalism's Deadly World Disorder," a talk presented by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes to a regional socialist educational conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, in April 1993. The talk and discussion that followed appear as the third chapter in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. The book is copyright © 1999 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.  
 
 
BY JACK BARNES 
The rulers try to convince people... that the conditions faced by the elderly are not the problem of the middle-aged or the young. The capitalist does not care about the first thirteen years of workers' lives; then he cares about our ability to work hard for the next fifty years; then he hopes we die quickly. That coarse attitude is what the rulers try to get layers of the working population to accept as well.

The most revealing explanations of what the bipartisan assault on Social Security is all about are those made by some of the more boldly forthright statisticians and economists. They say: when we passed Social Security legislation in the mid-1930s, when we conceded to the rising industrial union movement there was a need for it, we never expected to have to pay out most of it, because average life expectancy in the United States was lower than the retirement age of sixty-five. (Yes, lower, by about five years on average, much lower than that for workers, and more than ten years lower for Blacks.) But now workers live some ten years longer than retirement age, on average. So our lifespan has become a big problem for the rulers. Why won't you people face this? the "experts" ask.

Read their economic articles; read their debates and arguments about the Social Security fund. This is the capitalists' complaint. To them, Social Security was a concession. It might ameliorate some problems that could otherwise become destabilizing, but they never intended for workers to live off it for very long. The insurance specialists, the actuaries had it all figured out: Look at the averages, they said; few will get much of anything for more than a year or two. We can handle that; don't worry.

Workers had a different view. For us, Social Security was the beginning of the attempt to moderate the dog-eat-dog competition imposed on the working class under capitalism. Social Security was an initial step by our class—by those who produce wealth—toward conquering the social organization of conditions necessary for life, such as education and health care, for a lifetime. Workers think of each other in terms of a lifetime. We cannot think of each other the way capitalists think of us. We cannot make ourselves think of other human beings as though they do not exist up to the age of thirteen or after the age of sixty-five. That is not how workers function. We have a different class view, a different moral view of society. Elementary human solidarity is in our interests, not in conflict with them.  
 

Battle for Social Security

For the working class, there is no real Social Security that does not cover the entire lifetime of a worker. For the working class, there is no real education that is not lifetime education.

That is what the battle for Social Security was and remains. It was never just about pensions. What we won in 1935, with all its inadequacies, nonetheless encompassed the first federal-guaranteed universal unemployment benefits and the first guaranteed disability compensation. It established the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program that politicians in both parties are talking today about dumping.¹ Out of the Black rights battles of the 1950s and early 1960s, the working class won the extension of Social Security to include health benefits like Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for workers with very low incomes.

To the political vanguard of the working class, Social Security has always been about the battle to bring all welfare payments, all medical claims, all supplemental payments for education and child care into a comprehensive, nationwide, government-guaranteed entitlement. That is why the term "the social wage" is a useful one. We are talking about something that goes beyond the wage any individual worker receives from an employer. We are talking about something that the working class and labor movement fight to establish as social rights for all.

But for the capitalists, Social Security was about making the smallest concessions necessary. It was about looking at actuarial tables to make sure that payments would never take much out of their potential profits or reduce their power over a divided and insecure working class. That is how the exploiters still look at it.

Workers should never present today's crisis of the propertied classes and their social system as primarily an economic crisis. No, it is the great political and moral crisis of our time. It is proof that only the working class has a chance to resolve this crisis and begin transforming society in a truly human way. Because only the working class, the propertyless class, has no interest in turning like dogs on any of the victims of the crisis-ridden capitalist system.

That is why the battle for jobs, the battle for solidarity, the battle against racism and the oppression of women, the battle against immigrant-bashing, the battle for social protection—why all these are a battle for the life and death of the labor movement. They are the battle for the time and space to prepare a socialist revolution! That is what is at stake in pulling the working class together.

Consider the political implications of the capitalists' assault on entitlements here in the United States over the past decade or so. Thinking workers must explain this to other working people: "Look at what they're doing to our class. Look at what they're doing to the social wage, to the entitlements we have fought for and won. Our class is under assault. They're pitting us against each other and tearing us apart."  
 

The stakes for free labor

The working class is being torn apart in the plants, too—literally. There are industries where thousands of immigrant workers and other workers who have become desperate for a job offer their limbs in exchange for a weekly wage. That is the bargain in more and more meatpacking plants in this country. The frequency of carpal tunnel and other repetitive motion injuries is staggering. Normal use of hands, shoulders, necks, vertebrae, and tendons is lost—sometimes forever. Not to mention injuries from knives and machinery. It is not just selling your labor power; it is selling life and limb.

The working class fought bloody battles over the last two centuries, as industrial capitalism expanded, to make sure we would not face these kinds of conditions as a norm. We built unions and fought to end all forms of physical bondage. We fought for laws that took away the "right" for anyone to sell themselves—or any little piece of themselves. It was working people who fought for this: for human beings not to be treated like commodities....

The exploiters under crisis conditions always attempt to push back the clock of history. It was only a little more than a century ago that chattel slavery was swept away in the Civil War, the second American revolution. The door was opened to a vast expansion of free labor, on the land and in the factories. Under the momentum of the political reaction following the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, however, the capitalists pushed back rural labor in the U.S. South toward forms of peonage. That was part of the social counterrevolution that imposed Jim Crow segregation on the oppressed Black nationality and left the toilers of this country weakened and divided. It took the rise of the industrial union movement and then the mass Black rights battles in this century to begin reversing the consequences of that historic setback.

This is what the broader historic struggle for Social Security is all about. It is about whether workers have a lifetime right to medical care; to workers' compensation if we are injured; to unemployment insurance for as long as needed. It is part and parcel of the fight for affirmative action to combat racist and antiwoman discrimination, so we can unite our class and strengthen the labor movement. It is about the fight to ensure jobs for all; to raise the wages and shorten the hours of the working class; and to defend health and safety on and off the job.

It is a fight to keep the capitalists from tearing the working class apart.  
 
 
 
¹ Acting on his 1992 campaign pledge "to end welfare as we know it" and "move people from welfare to work," Clinton in the fall of 1996 signed into law the bipartisan "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act," eliminating federally guaranteed Aid for Families with Dependent Children. AFDC payments were replaced by federal "block grants" to each individual state—a shift that both reduced the overall funds for such payments, and transferred to state governments the power to disburse. The so-called welfare reform act also cut off food stamps and Medicaid to many working people.

In early 1999 Clinton boasted that welfare rolls in the United States were down 44 percent from 1994, failing to mention that up to 50 percent of those denied payments had no jobs at all and the majority of the rest were employed at makework jobs paying minimum wage with no benefits. A federal study released in early 1999 also revealed that one-quarter of the $12 billion allotted to state governments for welfare payments in 1998 had actually been used for other purposes.

In his remarks during the 1996 Senate debate on the legislation, Democratic senator Daniel Moynihan of New York said that the Clinton proposal "is not 'welfare reform,' it is 'welfare repeal.' It is 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." In fact, politicians in both big-business parties—from the Clinton administration, to the Republican leadership in Congress—are increasingly preparing the ground to erode the universal and federally financed character of pensions. To rationalize this course, the employing class is promoting the notion that the Social Security system will be bankrupted early in the next century unless working people and worse-off layers of the middle class recognize that they cannot depend on federal pensions to make it through retirement—and must "supplement" these payments through private savings and investment accounts that they finance themselves, and for which they must individually bear the "market risk."  
 
 
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