What if someone had told us even one year ago that some of the largest banks and insurance companies in Sweden—supposedly one of the most stable capitalist economies in Europe—were going to be on the verge of bankruptcy and face a forced financial reorganization before the end of 1992? That the Swedish government would raise short-term interest rates to 500 percent for several weeks in an effort to fend off devaluation in face of a massive run on the krona? And that the officialdom of the trade unions and Social Democratic Party—in order to "save Sweden" and find a way for Swedish business to compete successfully in Europe—would openly support measures that began dismantling piece by piece government-financed health care, pension benefits, and other social rights won by the working class? All that happened this year.

What is happening to the so-called welfare state in Sweden is symptomatic of the growing pressures throughout the imperialist countries on the social wage. The capitalists and their governments are stepping up attacks on the right of the working class to get back a small portion of the wealth we produce, so that we and our families can make it through a lifetime.

Since the end of World War II, workers in industrially advanced capitalist countries have, to varying degrees, come to consider as fundamental rights certain kinds of lifetime social security we have fought for and won. In a few capitalist countries, including Sweden, these social conquests by the labor movement were quite extensive. But today it is as if the film is being run backward, and we are watching the modern capitalist world regress toward its infancy. In reality, however, what we are seeing are not newsreels but previews—previews of what capitalism always reverts to as a crisis sharply accelerates. The capitalists are pushing to recreate conditions in which those of us who are young enough and well enough to work are forced to do so for as little pay as possible—and those who are too old or too sick, to hell with them!

If a worker faces desperate economic pressures, the bosses insist, such problems ought be taken care of largely by that person's family, or by charity, or by the church. Any government programs that do exist, they say, should be based purely on "need," not provided as a social right, as an entitlement, to the entire working class and population. The capitalists' goal is to deepen a division within the working class between those who earn, and those who "live off" others who earn (or are taken care of by charity). The goal is to demoralize layer after layer of the working class.  
 

'Battle for soul of the working class'

Moreover, beginning in the early 1970s, real wages—wages discounted for inflation, what workers can actually buy with what we bring home each week—began to slide in the United States. Last year, according to the government's own figures, average hourly wages for manufacturing workers were lower than in 1967! The true situation is even worse when the decline in the social wage of the working class, and of the public services we use, are included. For the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the capitalists may be actually driving down the value, not just the price, of our labor power.²

Unemployment rates are also substantially higher today on average than they used to be. In the United States, official jobless rates of 6 percent or even more—which were sure signs of a recession prior to the mid-1970s—are today the norm during upturns in the capitalist business cycle. The average annual unemployment rate since 1974 has been just above 7 percent, compared to 4.8 percent for the quarter century prior to that. And those jobless figures—the ones Washington releases each month—do not include the growing numbers who have been forced into low-wage temporary or part-time jobs or who are not counted as "looking for work" by government agencies. That figure, which the government does not publicize very much, has averaged 10 percent since the mid-1970s, and the true situation is undoubtedly worse than that.

Unemployment is even higher across capitalist Europe. The average jobless figure for the countries that make up the European Community is 10 percent, and that has been the average for most of the past decade; it has not dropped below 8 percent since 1981. And the figure is substantially higher in several of the weaker imperialist countries; in Spain, for example, the official jobless rate is more than 18 percent. Contrast those figures for Europe to the average during the two decades prior to 1974—2.7 percent.

At the same time that unemployment is rising, overtime is stretching out the workweek the longest it has been since the end of World War II, further dividing the working class. And speedup is taking a heavier and heavier toll on health and safety on the job—and increasing the incidence of explosions, derailments, crashes, and other accidents that endanger the general public as well.

The experience of the working class over the past decade once again confirms Marx's assessment some 130 years ago that "the same circumstances which allow the capitalist in the long run to prolong the working day also allow him at first, and compel him finally, to reduce the price of labor nominally as well until the total price of the increased number of hours goes down, and therefore the daily or weekly wage falls."³  
 
 
1. In August 1996 Clinton signed into law the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act," eliminating Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

2. Six years after this talk was given, at the opening of 1999, median real earnings of workers in the United States—despite modest annual increases from 1996 through 1998—still had not surpassed their level of the early 1970s, nor had median family income.

3.Capital, vol. 1 (Penguin), p. 689.  
 
 
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