Vol. 74/No. 38      October 11, 2010

BY JACK BARNES  
One of the most important conquests of the mass, proletarian-led struggle for Black rights in the 1950s and 1960s was the substantial extension of workers’ social wage that had been won as a by-product of working-class battles that built the industrial unions in the 1930s. As a direct result of the movement that brought down Jim Crow and the urban uprisings that turned the country and the confidence of the ruling class upside down, Medicare and Medicaid were won in 1965. And in 1972—thirty-five years after the original Social Security legislation—the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program for the blind, disabled, and elderly was established.

The Social Security Act of 1935 had included small retirement supplements for many workers, federally mandated unemployment insurance and workers compensation, and aid for dependent children (paid to eligible mothers). It’s important to remember that this legislation had been crafted by the Roosevelt administration to serve the needs of capital by limiting concessions as much as possible. For example, not only were retirement benefits financed in part by a payroll tax on workers (a regressive, anti-working-class measure), but the minimal sums paid out were meant only as a minor supplement to whatever workers were able to put aside for old age (usually nothing) or get from their adult sons and daughters.

What’s more, since average life expectancy in 1935 was below sixty-two, and just below sixty for men, the anticipated government payout on pension benefits beginning at age sixty-five would be small—in fact, in close to a majority of cases, nary a penny!

Social Security payments were not intended to defend and strengthen the working class. They returned to workers no more than a token of the wealth produced by our social labor. Social Security was aimed at bolstering the responsibility of the petty-bourgeois family for meeting the needs of the young, the elderly, the disabled, and the ill, including reinforcing the social norm that the place of working-class women with dependent children was in the home. (I say working-class women, because the bourgeois family has always hired or retained a phalanx of wet nurses, nannies, tutors, and even dog-walkers—in the latter case, the comical twenty-first century surrogate for the old bourgeois stable staff.)

All sanctimonious prattle by the capitalist rulers and their spokespersons about “defending the working-class family” serves only to obfuscate bourgeois social relations in order to absolve the propertied ruling families and their government institutions of social responsibility for food and clothing, education, health care, housing, transportation, and more. It is the banner under which these responsibilities are pressed on individual workers—that is, primarily on women.

It is these capitalist property relations that are the root of so much individual and “family” misery today. Only when they are uprooted through revolutionary action by the working classes ourselves, only when economic compulsion—the wages system, the “cash nexus”—ceases to be the foundation of all social interaction, will new human relations eventually emerge. We cannot even begin to imagine what those relations will be, but the one thing we can be sure of is that they will have little in common with the petty-bourgeois family of today, much less the propertied family of the capitalist class.*

Working people have a vital stake not only in defending the social wage we’ve fought for and won, but above all in building a mass social and political movement of the working class to extend these conquests as universal rights—not means-tested charity—for all. Through our labor, the working class, in this country and worldwide, produces more than enough wealth to provide education, health care, housing, and retirement to every human being on earth, for a lifetime.

Today’s counterpart of this institution among the propertyless working masses (also, and confusingly, known in everyday speech as a “family”) is descended from the petty-bourgeois family of the peasantry—a productive unit in which every man, woman, and child of all generations labored under the father’s domination to provide the necessities of life. The survival of individual members of this production unit depended on the mutual contributions of all.

With the rise of industrial capitalism, a hereditary proletariat was born through the forcible dispossession of the peasantry from the land. Members of the previously productive peasant family—children and women first of all—were now forced to sell their labor power individually on the market to a capitalist employer, with all the brutality and suffering that produced. In the process, the petty-bourgeois family was ripped asunder. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, the young Frederick Engels, with great eloquence and compassion, described the horrendous consequences of this dispossession and proletarianization as it occurred there, and then across Western Europe.

The working class everywhere organized and fought to curb the degree of that exploitation, demanding a shorter workday, curtailment of child labor, higher wages, and legislation to regulate factory conditions. Meanwhile, armies of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois reformers set out to reimpose on the toilers as individuals, and on women first and foremost, the responsibility for reproducing and maintaining the working class, including those too young, too old, or too sick to sell their labor power. The concrete complexities of this historical transition from precapitalist to capitalist property and social relations have differed from one part of the world to another. But the modern form of the petty-bourgeois family is today as universally recognizable to the factory worker in Shanghai as it is to his or her fellow worker in Manchester, Atlanta, Cairo, Johannesburg, or Mexico City.

For a further discussion of the emergence of the family in class society, see “Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation” by Mary-Alice Waters, resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party national convention (August 1979), in Mary-Alice Waters (ed.), Communist Continuity and the Fight for Women’s Liberation, Part I (Pathfinder, 1992).