The excerpt below, dealing with the bipartisan assault on social security, is taken from "Capitalism's Deadly World Disorder," a talk given April 10, 1993, at a regional socialist educational conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the following day to a similar gathering in Des Moines, Iowa. This excerpt can be found on pages 247-49. The entire presentation appears in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. Copyright © 1999 Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. 
 
BY JACK BARNES  
The rulers try to convince people, for instance, 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 on 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.

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. 
 
 
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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