In fact, working people were dealt a blow by the spectacle, egged on by the big-business media, public officials, and bourgeois pundits of various stripes.

Giuliani is no friend of working people. Neither are any of his opponents in the race--Democrat, Republican, Conservative, or Right-to-Life. He faced growing working-class resistance in the city against the policies his administration pursued.

The mayor has been leading the charge for the super-wealthy ruling class on a range of central questions. This includes targeting democratic rights in the guise of "fighting crime" and "terrorism," seeking to weaken or co-opt labor unions, and justifying increased police brutality. At the same time he sought to criminalize whole sections of the working class, and restrict free speech, freedom of expression, and the right to stage public protests by claiming he was "cleaning up New York."

These issues and assaults were increasingly being fought out as political policy questions, with different class views being articulated and mobilized around. They were more and more seen as social questions on the level of the city and state government. Various parties and currents--bourgeois and working class--took stands on these questions and sought to bring forces to bear--in the courts, in the streets, and in elections, to influence and change them.

This was replaced, almost overnight, with its opposite: an explosion of gossip, speculation, and "news" about details of the private lives of Giuliani, his wife Donna Hanover, and their children, as well as other women the mayor is or was charged with associating with. Fashion insights, sentimentalism, emotion, and TV-style divorce court spectacles ruled the day.

The aim of this is to divert working people into the gutter of the politics of resentment, fascination with the problems and "exposures" of the moral character of the "rich and powerful," and titillation over "facts" about the private lives of public figures. The purpose is to get working people--victimized by the policies carried out by the Giuliani administration--to start thinking, "At least he got his."

In this context, clearly dealing with policy issues, taking up questions on the level of class politics, and posing the question of government responsibility, can get sidetracked and diffused. To the degree workers were drawn into this spectacle--urged on by capitalist politicians and the big-business media--blows were dealt to them as a class.

"The 'pornographication' of politics," writes Jack Barnes in Capitalism's World Disorder, "whoever its alleged target, ultimately redounds to the detriment of the rights of the working class. The fight for the moral high ground, and against the coarsening of political discourse, is a fight by the working class both for allies and for the space to practice politics free from harassment by the government, the bosses, and rightist thugs." The book's explanation of this class question bears reading and studying.

An individual capitalist politician "getting his" through such means is not how working people will confront the assaults by the employers and their government. It targets every hard-won right, starting with the right to privacy. It corrodes human solidarity, the dignity the working class brings to human relations. It cuts across the need to fight to solve the manifestations and effects of the growing social crisis caused by capitalism through the collective organization, education, and mobilization of working people charting a course to take power.

This kind of assault on the working class is what was bound up in the impeachment drive against U.S. president William Clinton last year. That rightist drive, which harnessed the most undemocratic portion of the U.S. Constitution--that of impeachment--with detailed "reports" by lawyers on his personal relations--ultimately targeted the rights and conquests of workers and farmers.

Millions across the country, especially among African-Americans, opposed the impeachment effort because they sensed its undemocratic character and the fact that women's rights, affirmative action, equality before the law, and other social conquests would be in the gun sights of the same forces sooner or later.

Recognizing the poison of these assaults within bourgeois circles can help strengthen the working class by drawing the lessons of why these should be rejected and campaigned against whenever they arise. It can help gird us for when the same methods are used by rightist and fascist forces against union fighters, leaders of struggles against police brutality, defenders of women's rights, and those in the forefront of the battles of working farmers today.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home