Vol. 75/No. 30      August 22, 2011

Below is an excerpt from The Eastern Airlines Strike: Accomplishments of the Rank-and-File Machinists, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for August. It is from the chapter “Capitalism’s March Toward War and Depression,” based on talks given in late 1990 by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party.

Barnes’s description of the causes of the 1990-91 recession, and of resistance to the employers’ stepped-up assaults on wages and job conditions, hold lessons for workers in face of today’s world capitalist crisis. Copyright © 1991 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES  
As the working class in the United States goes into the current recession, it has already been the victim of a more than decade-long offensive by the employing class against our living and working conditions. Workers’ real wages dropped by 8 percent in the 1980s. In fact our buying power has dropped so sharply that it is now at the same level as in 1961. Since 1980 our pensions, health benefits, and insurance protection have dropped about 15 percent on average in real money terms… .

With unemployment already rising sharply, only one-third of those out of work in this country are currently receiving jobless benefits, largely because of major government slashes in the form of stiffer eligibility requirements. This contrasts to more than three-quarters of jobless workers during the 1974-75 recession and about half during the deep capitalist downturn in 1981-82… .

The capitalists are weighed down under an enormous debt structure that reached historic heights during the 1980s. Investment in new, capacity-expanding plant and equipment stagnated throughout the decade. Meanwhile, there was an explosion of real estate speculation, debt-financed buyouts and mergers, and junk bonds, plus growing instability on the stock and commodities markets. The Third World debt continued to climb to staggering levels, devastating the workers and peasants in those countries and putting new strains on the imperialist banking structure. The banks, savings and loan institutions, and giant insurance companies in the United States—as well as the funds today available to government agencies that supposedly protect depositors and beneficiaries—are in their weakest condition in many decades.

Sudden breakdowns or partial crises on any one or more of these fronts—all of which are more vulnerable given today’s capitalist downturn—threaten to turn a recession into a collapse of the international banking system that can plunge the world into a major depression and social crisis.

The employers, their government, and the Democratic and Republican party politicians continue to press their anti-working-class, union-busting offensive. The ultimate solution to all the country’s economic problems, they insist, is to guarantee workers the “right” to work in a “union-free environment.” More and more they act as if the only good worker is a “permanent replacement” worker.

The bosses continue to demand takeback contracts—such as the recent pacts accepted by the United Auto Workers officialdom—that deepen divisions in the working class by agreeing to trade off wages, conditions, and job opportunities for younger workers and new hires in return for the will-o’-the-wisp of “job security” for a declining number of higher-seniority union members. The employers continually push to gut health and pension benefits, speed up production with less union control over safety on the job, and ravage the environment.

City and state governments around the country—as in the mid-1970s—are complaining of “declining tax revenues” and “tightening budgets,” and “reluctantly” point to the need to sharply cut the rolls of public employees and impose takeback contracts. Governors and mayors are slashing expenditures on basic health services, education, child care, and other social programs that millions of working people depend on. Bridges and roads continue to deteriorate dangerously… .

The U.S. working class and labor movement have suffered blows; our unions have been further weakened by the class-collaborationist and proimperialist course of the labor officialdom; and we have been put on the defensive by the accelerated onslaught of the employers in the 1980s.

But we have not been defeated. The labor movement has not been shoved out of the center of politics in this country. Our capacity to resist has not been broken.

Since the middle of the 1980s, as resistance by the working class and unions in the United States has evolved, a pattern has emerged. Despite the difficulties, despite the blows, workers and unionists in the United States pushed to the wall by the employers’ assaults have found ways to fight. Layer after layer of workers have managed to avoid simply being handcuffed, chained, and prevented from organizing to defend themselves. They have done so even when the bosses and labor bureaucrats have combined to block them from using standard union tactics that have brought victories throughout the history of the labor movement—that is, even when they are blocked from organizing union power and solidarity to shut down production… .

Important experiences with rich lessons on how to forge unity, overcome divisions, and wage an effective struggle have begun to be accumulated by a small vanguard of fighters in the labor movement. These defensive efforts are waged from a position of weakness. The ranks are not in a strong enough position to push aside the current labor officialdom and replace it with another leadership that has an alternative, class-struggle strategy. Their efforts have to take place largely within the limits of the strategy imposed by this ossified bureaucracy. But this fact makes these experiences no less important as the arena where rank-and-file fighters find each other and test each other.
 
 
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For a federal public works program
Rally protests closing of yet another NY hospital  
 
 
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