Dixon asks, “I thought the drive to stem the declining profit rate of the capitalist system was behind the political and moral crisis of our time. Is this not true or am I missing something?”

The editorial takes up the recent call by U.S. Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan to cut Social Security benefits and the favorable response it has received in big-business circles. Repeating a common argument peddled by the employer class, Greenspan claimed this entitlement is on the verge of “bankruptcy” because of the large numbers of so-called baby boomers approaching retirement. The Militant makes the point that Greenspan’s remarks were carefully calculated to “soften the beaches for a government assault on Social Security.”

The editorial states, “The tiny handful of billionaire families who rule the United States, however, face an increasingly acute crisis. Since the mid-1970s their profit rates have continued to decline. To turn this around they are driven by the inexorable workings of capitalism to wage a double offensive—a military offensive abroad under the banner of the ‘war on terrorism’ and an offensive at home to roll back the social gains of workers and farmers and intensify class exploitation. That means ultimately dismantling the social security system and forcing workers to fend for themselves.”

Different social classes have different approaches to this question—the billionaire bankers, industrialists, and landowners on the one hand, and workers and farmers on the other. From the point of view of the ruling class and their spokespeople, it’s a “problem” that our class lives longer—often a decade past the retirement age—than we did when Social Security was instituted in the 1930s. In their warped mind, our longevity is cutting into their profits. But since that argument is a little too crude, they try to rope working people into accepting their framework by posing it as a budgetary question that “we” must be concerned about, and that the solution is to find some way to “balance the budget.”

From the point of view of working people, on the other hand, social security is a necessity, a social right. And the limited benefits we earn today are a by-product of the massive labor struggles of the 1930s and the Black rights battles of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Above all, the fight to defend and extend social security is not fundamentally an economic but a political question. It’s about preventing the ruling class and the brutal consequences of their economic system from tearing up the solidarity and integrity of our class. The bosses constantly foster the rat-race mentality of looking out for “me and mine” and to hell with everyone else. Working people can solve the common problems we face, which are caused by capitalism, only by fighting as a class and championing the interests of all the oppressed, beginning with those most vulnerable to attack. That’s the political and moral starting point for our class.

I think this is stated best in Pathfinder Press’s Capitalism’s World Disorder by Jack Barnes. He states that for working people, “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.”

The working class is the only class in history that has the capacity to organize a “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority,” as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto. To meet that political and moral challenge of our epoch, working people need to forge a revolutionary leadership that can unite workers and farmers in a struggle to wrest state power out of the hands of the exploiters, to put it in our own hands, and to build a decent world.  
 
 
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