First Published: The 80’s, Vol. 1, No. 2, September 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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In his crisis of confidence speech in July 1979, Carter was forced to admit that by the bourgeoisie’s own polls, ”for the first time in the history of America, a majority of people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.” In a 1979 Wall Street Journal ’’man on the street” panel, Mike Shore, a 26-year-old auto assembly worker from Kansas City said, “I think things will get better a year from now. But then three more years down the road, I think we might hit another 1929. I don’t think anybody will come out with real, problem-solving answers. We’ll just have some temporary band-aids.” Sue Dodson, a housewife and part-time clerk added, “The country’s kind of in a panic situation.”
Panic situation. This is indeed the feeling of hundreds of millions of Americans caught in the grip of the worst economic crisis to hit this country, far deeper than the economic crisis of the 1930s. Compared to the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, life in the 80’s seems indeed bleak.
And the American people want answers. More than ever before, people are questioning the ability of the capitalist system to provide even the most basic necessities of life. “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” goals proclaimed by the rising U.S. bourgeoisie in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 seem impossible 200 years later. The American Dream built up in the false prosperity of the post-World War II decades has been consumed in the fire of this crisis and the true nature of this capitalist hell comes to the surface. Jerry Tung, General Secretary of the Communist Workers Party, has said, “And even though the hardships, the economic hardship and the various social consequences of economic hardship will be tremendous, the suffering will be tremendous, there’ll be untold kind of misery for the masses in the coming period, also in the coming period, there WILL be another opportunity for the working class to emancipate ourselves once and for all, to break the chains of wage slavery once and for all. So this coming period is a very dangerous period, but at the same time it is also a period full of opportunity and the future is very, very bright.”
The depth of stagnation of U.S industry has turned once proud centers of industry like Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio into vast death valleys. But for every Detroit in the country, there exist a hundred unheralded smaller cities doomed by the death of such pillars of the economy as auto and steel.
Take Toledo, Ohio for example. With the severe slump in the auto industry, on which Toledo’s industry heavily depends, the city is in grave crisis. A New York Times article, “Stalled Autos: As Detroit Goes, So Goes Toledo,” pointed out that unemployment stood at 10.6% officially at the end of April but Thomas Klein, director of the University of Toledo’s Business Research Center said in June, “My guess is that now it’s up to about 14%.” With some 35% of the area’s employment tied to the auto industry, the crisis cuts deep. So far, the area’s biggest employer, American Motors, has 2,100 of 6,700 workers on indefinite layoff. The Chrysler Corporation’s machining plant in nearby Perrysburg has laid off more than half its normal workforce. Some 1,350 of 4,200 wage earners at the Chevrolet transmission plant in Toledo are on layoff. More than 1,600 of Libby-Owens-Ford’s 4,000 workers at the two main auto glass manufacturing plants in the area are on layoff, and one of the two furnaces at the nearby Rossford plant has been shut down entirely.
As the major auto companies go down, the parts business (or “aftermarket”) is going down with them. In Toledo, this means big ones like Champion Spark Plug as well as smaller companies. This means more layoffs all along the line.
Another industry hit by the decline of Toledo is the shipping industry. With the demand for cars down, shipping of iron ore, coal and limestone for the steel industry has slackened. One-third of the Great Lake Fleet is idle for lack of cargo – and that means that one-third of the seamen are out of jobs. Eight ships lie idle in Toledo alone.
If Toledo gets pneumonia as the auto industry catches cold, the sickness can be fatal for small business in the city. The Lil Sheba Bar, across from the Chevrolet transmission plant usually has 80 customers nightly. According to Beverly Baumer, a woman bartender, “Now we’re getting only about ten.” The Canteen Service Company of Toledo, which operates coffee, sandwich and snack vending machines, has lost more than a quarter of its business as the city’s workforce faces greater and greater joblessness.
Even the Toledo Mud Hens, a Minnesota Twins farm club in the international League, are hurting. Last year they sold 1,135 season tickets and this year expected to sell 1,400. “But because of the economy, we ended up with only 1,080,” said a team official.
As the tax base erodes, the city government is also hard hit. So far this year, because of the decline in the payroll tax, the city will fall $3 million short of its projected revenues. Three hundred workers are being laid off and hours at the city’s libraries and swimming pools are being cut back.
Laid-off workers in Toledo are eligible for 39 weeks of unemployment. Today, however, with the auto industry gasping its last4n the country and in the city, the question has become “Where am I going to find work in a couple more months?”
The same question haunts the jobless steelworkers in Braddock, Pennsylvania. A steel town on the banks of the Monongahela River, its U.S. Steel Edgar Thompson Steel Works has been shut down, laying off 600 workers. For Braddock, this is no mere recession, but a stunning depression. An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer described its effects:
(Lloyd) Rickard, 50 is a pipefitter. He was laid off recently despite his 32 years of seniority at the Edgar Thompson Works. It was the first time in 17 years that he had been laid off.
’It happened six times the first 15 years,’ Rickard says. ’But those times were different. This time everything’s down – not just one department.’
This time, too, Rickard knew the sword was about to descend. Seniority made him among the last to be laid off. So for weeks, he watched as the layoffs swept through the ranks of his brother steelworkers, starting with the rawest youngsters and gradually cutting down the older workers.
’Three weeks in advance, I knew it was coming,’ he says. ’We cut back as best we could, right then. With a house full of kids to feed, though, that isn’t easy.’
Rickard and his wife, Karen, have four children ages 5 to 11. For Karen, this layoff has been a shock.
’Sometimes it seems like it’s happening to someone else,’ she ways. ’I look around, and Lloyd is here, and I have to remind myself that he’s not just working the graveyard shift. I’ve made an attempt to economize. We look at every dollar now. Of course, the junk food was the first thing to go. But the kids are used to saying “I want it” and getting it.’
Rickard’s $162-a-week unemployment checks from the state will last a maximum of 30 weeks. After that, depending on the national rate of unemployment, a federal program can extend them another nine weeks.
But beyond that, unemployment benefits will terminate. The only income available to the family would be through welfare and aid to dependent children.
Karen Rickard shudders when she thinks of it. ’Thirty weeks,’ she says. T can’t imagine that. Ninety per cent of our friends work at Edgar Thompson. My husband is 50 years old. What’s he going to do?’
Her husband refuses to answer that question directly, but says darkly: ’People’s gonna have to live, one way or another. This layoff goes on past the time when people have unemployment benefits, things could get really ugly down in that valley.’
Another Braddock resident is slightly less cryptic. ’This shutdown goes on too long,’ he says, ’you’re gonna see blood in the streets down here. When men can’t feed their families, there’s gonna be riots’
As a Marxist-Leninist party, the CWP says that the only way out of this permanent crisis with all the misery and untold suffering under capitalism is to overthrow it by revolutionary violence and set up workers’ rule, the dictatorship of the working class.
How do we arrive at this conclusion?
We follow Marxism-Leninism Mao Tsetung Thought, the theoretical basis guiding our thinking. Along with Marxist philosophy and scientific socialism, political economy, the study of the relations men enter into for production of life’s necessities, is the basis of our basic political line – that we make immediate and all-rounded preparation for workers’ rule, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and particularly that we are now in a pre-revolutionary situation.
Marxist political economy was born with the appearance of the modern proletariat and highly-developed productive forces, large-scale industries, under capitalism. Marx used revolutionary materialist dialectics to analyze capitalist society. Through decades of study and class struggle, Marx ruthlessly dissected the capitalist mode of production and revealed the secrets of how the capitalists exploit workers. He scientifically showed the contradictions between the socialized nature of production, where production is done through the cooperative effort of millions upon millions in society, and the capitalist ownership of the means of production (the mines, factories, tools, etc.) by a handful of monopoly capitalists. These contradictions came out as the sharp class struggle between the two great classes under capitalism – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. With the social contradictions of capitalism at all times intensifying, the proletariat, as the gravediggers of capitalism, strengthens itself. As Marx said, “The knell of capitalist private property will soon be struck. The expropriators will be expropriated.”
From this, the revolutionary and scientific conclusion of the inevitable replacement of the capitalist system by the socialist system and the bourgeois dictatorship by the dictatorship of the working class was arrived at. In his article, “Karl Marx,” Lenin stated “.. .it is evident that Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society wholly and exclusively from the economic law of development of contemporary society.” (Selected Works, Vol. I, pp.50-51)
Today we are in a pre-revolutionary situation. Jerry Tung has said, “The chickens have come home to roost. U.S. imperialists are no longer able to shift their crisis onto the backs of other countries, or to bribe a small stratum of labor aristocrats and misleaders in this country to keep the lid down and lull the masses to sleep. This is a period when the economic crisis really starts to develop full-bloom.
Using Marx’ words, the ’historic lever’ of economic crisis is acting up in a most thorough-going way – in a way which affects people, not just conscious people, not just advanced, not just people in the black liberation movement, people who have been fighting the last several years, but everybody, regardless of their background, whether they’re political or not. This period is a period of rapid capitalist destabilization. The historic action of the economic crisis is stirring people awake, and causing tremendous misery and suffering among the people but at the same time, people start looking.
There exists a widespread prejudice about the post-World War II period that goes something like this: “Overall, things got better for people economically after the war – there were more jobs, especially compared to the Depression, and people could buy homes, cars, furniture, etc. Even though today things are rougher than before, how can you talk about the absolute impoverishment of the proletariat? That stuff is outdated Marxist rhetoric.”
Lenin did say “The impoverishment of the workers is absolute. That is to say, they become poorer and poorer, their lives more miserable, their meals worse, and their stomachs less full. And they have to be crowded into basements and attics.” (“The Impoverishment of Capitalist Society,” Collected Works, Vol. 18) Not only was that true during the last few decades, but it set up a situation in the 80’s where the effects of the crisis will dwarf the social consequences of the Great Depression.
To look at this question from a Marxist perspective, we must first look at the impoverishment of the workers from the class standpoint. We must first eliminate the labor aristocracy who have been bought off by the capitalists, including Fraser, Winpisinger, and those types. Because they are a bribed stratum, they do enjoy a higher standard of living than the rest of the workers. They are no longer members of the working class, but renegades who have sold out the workers.
We must also analyze the impoverishment of the proletariat from an historical and concrete viewpoint. Living standards in different countries and in different times are not the same, so it is nothing but a trick to make a simple comparison of the present with the past, or of the U.S. with another country. A favorite sleight-of-hand of the bourgeoisie is to compare the “free enterprise” U.S. with China under Mao to show how well-off we are or to show how well-off we are now compared to our grandparents in terms of income, jobs, etc.
On the question of workers’ impoverishment, we must have an overall viewpoint. This means we cannot judge the living conditions of workers today on the basis of an individual plant, a specific location, or a specific period. We should judge the living conditions of the working class over a long period of time. We must not only look at the living conditions of the employed workers, but also at the living conditions of the unemployed and semi-employed workers. We must not only look at the living conditions of the workers in the imperialist country, but also at the living conditions of the workers in the colonies, Puerto Rico and Hawaii for instance. We must not only look at living conditions during the times of illusory capitalist prosperity, but also during the times of economic crisis.
From this viewpoint, as we will show, the living conditions of the workers and poor of this country have in fact gotten worse, and the 80’s will bring this home to people with a terrible swiftness and intensity.
In the process of capital accumulation by the capitalists, wealth is constantly accumulated at one end and poverty is accumulated at the other. “This,” Marx said, “is an absolute and general law of capitalist accumulation.” (Capital, Vol. 1)
From national income figures, we can see how the workers have been relatively impoverished in the U.S National income is the sum total of newly-created value of the whole society in one year. In capitalist society, national income is first divided into the part that goes to the workers’ wages and the part of the workers’ labor that is plundered by the capitalists as surplus value, the source of all profit under capitalism.
Although national income is wholly created by the workers and increases steadily in the process of expanded capitalist reproduction, under capitalism the share of wages received by the proletariat steadily declines and the share of surplus value received by the bourgeoisie steadily increases. This is called the relative impoverishment of the proletariat. From U.S. government figures, the share of American workers’ wages in the national income was 45.6% in 1843, 43.5% in 1866, 42.7% in 1891, 37% in 1938, 33.3% in 1945 and 29.7% in 1956. Thus, even though the standard of living may have risen to a certain extent for the U.S. worker, the capitalist was taking bigger and bigger chunks of the pie and workers were left to divide up a shrinking percentage of it.
The illusory prosperity of the post-war decades was built on a foundation of sand. That was the tremendous growth of consumer credit of all kinds – home mortgages, car loans and credit cards. While giving the American people the illusion of owning their house, car and furniture, in reality it represented growing absolute impoverishment as debt mounted on debt. This crisis of the 80’s will reveal this stark reality as the American people are forced to pay in full for the temporary and illusory prosperity of the past few decades. With houses mortgaged and second-mortgaged, with cars half-owned by the bank, with credit cards worn out and carrying thousands of dollars of debt, the inability to pay the monthly bills because of joblessness today means the bottom literally drops out. And for the worker today, the fall in his accustomed standard of living will be like nothing he has ever experienced.
The basis of this trap was the bourgeoisie’s use of Keynesian deficit financing. To cope with the imperialist economy’s increasing stagnation and ever-deepening economic crises during the Great Depression and after, the U.S. ruling class turned to the theories of British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Keynesian economics is part of the bourgeoisie’s subjective factor, essentially bourgeois psychology implemented through state monopoly capitalism to try to stall economic crises and decrease unemployment. Completely missing the material basis for the crisis of overproduction – the exploitation of the proletariat – the Keynesian economists push the totally idealist and extremely shallow view that the chief cause of the stagnation and crises of capitalism is the lack of purchasing power (or what they call “effective demand”) and thus lack of investment by the capitalist to keep the economy rising. What they negate is the cause of the people’s lack of purchasing power – the extraction of surplus value (unpaid labor) from the workers by the bourgeoisie, the expulsion of men by machines in production, and the proletariat’s consequent impoverishment, both absolute and relative.
Keynesians contend that social purchasing power has to be raised artificially. But how do you do that? They answer by using and expanding tremendously the power of the government in economic life, that is, through state monopoly capitalism.
Keynesian policies consist of enlarged government spending in public construction to stimulate effective demand. To make up for the lack of investment from the private sector, it calls for stepped-up preparation for war and vastly increased armament production leading to the militarization of the entire economy. Moreover, Keynesian policies call for selective tax cuts, government subsidies and the lowering of interest rates to stimulate private investment.
But where does the government get the money to “prime the pump” as Keynesians put it? That’s the catch. The government creates it through deficit financing, that is, spending money above and beyond the revenues (mainly from taxes). The government literally creates money from thin air (or more concretely, from paper and ink), money not backed by real production of goods and services. Immediately, it produces mass indebtedness, and in the longer run, inflation. While the great bulk of the money goes for the militarization of the economy, some of it is also used to back up consumer purchases. In both sectors, the notes are coming due.
Take housing for instance. Part of the Roosevelt administration’s plan to pull the country out of the Depression in the 30’s was to stimulate the buying of homes. While it took World War II to pull the U.S. out, Roosevelt’s housing program did set up the machinery for the post-war spread to the suburbs.
Michael E. Stone’s article “Gimme Shelter” explains how it was done. To encourage financial institutions to make loans with low down payments and long terms, indeed to stimulate almost any lending in the 1930s, the federal government had to provide protection and assistance. This included mortgage insurance and guarantees through the Federal Housing Administration and later the Veterans Administration so that the banks would lend money for the construction and sale of owner-occupied housing without having to fear any loss if the borrowers could not pay. It included the Federal Home Loan Bank system which insures savings accounts and provides back-up funds to lending institutions which specialize in home ownership loans. It includes the Federal National Mortgage Association designed to facilitate the free flow of mortgage money throughout the country and attract additional funds to the residential mortgage system. And it also includes federal income tax benefits available to owners but not renters.
Pushed by the low down payment, long-term, federally-backed loan, for two decades after World War II the strategy devised in the 30’s was remarkably successful. Between 1946 and 1965 more than 29 million new housing units were started, most of them single-family suburban houses, representing a construction cost of over $300 billion. Along with military spending and imperialism, the suburban/debt economy fueled the post-war illusory prosperity of the U.S. Between 1946 and 1965 total debt in the economy grew from a little less than $400 billion to more than $ 1,200 billion. The biggest single element in this huge credit boom was housing debt. In 1946 residential mortgage debt was less than $30 billion. But by 1965 the spread of suburbs, financed primarily by government-insured mortgage loans, had increased residential mortgage debt more than 750% to nearly $260 billion in 1965. Today that figure has exploded to a whopping $900 billion in mortgage debts on the back of the American people, nearly double the $500 billion in 1975.
The rapid growth of suburbs and home ownership also generated a vast increase in consumer spending for cars to get to and from the homes and for furniture and appliances to put into the homes – also largely paid for with consumer credit. Today, automobile loans stand at nearly $ 120 billion, credit cards account for nearly $55 billion in debt and personal loans, such as education loans, stand at $125 billion. The total consumer debt is a back-breaking $1,200,000,000,000 – that is, nearly 1 and a quarter trillion dollars. That comes to about $5,455 of debt for every man, woman and child in the United States. (Figures from Newsweek, March 31, 1980, p.53)
As long as the U.S., through its hegemony over the non-socialist world after World War II, could export its crisis to the second and third world, the effects of the increasing stagnation of the economy like unemployment and worsening inflation could be hidden. But with the collapse of that hegemony due to the struggles for national liberation in Kampuchea, Vietnam, Laos and later in Nicaragua and Iran, the fight for economic and political independence as shown by OPEC countries, the fight for freedom from U.S. domination by the second world countries of Europe and Japan and the struggle for hegemony against the other imperialist superpower, the Soviet Union, the chickens are coming home to roost in a BIG WAY.
With crises starting to overlap and going deeper, with inflation running in double digits, the capitalists cannot allow the credit boom to continue. It was fueled with cheap credit, that is, printing dollars. Michael E. Stone points out why: “On the one hand, if the federal government allows the money supply to increase to meet all the needs for borrowed funds, this contributes to price increases in the economy, since the amount of borrowed money being spent goes up faster than the amount of goods and services being produced. Inflation leads to higher interest rates and more borrowing in anticipation of further prices increases (as the boom in credit-card buying in the last few years, which saw double digit inflation, attests to – J.S.). Debt accelerates far ahead of the ability to repay it, leading toward a financial crisis.
On the other hand, if the government tries to restrict the growth of credit to prevent or limit inflation, then some borrowers get squeezed out. Previously accumulated debts eventually have to be paid, and many individuals and businesses are totally dependent on new loans to pay off the old ones. Without continued access to credit to pay their bills, they may go bankrupt. Since the banks and other creditors have also borrowed heavily to expand their lending and stimulate the economy, when they do not get paid a chain of defaults can ensue. Thus a credit squeeze can also bring the financial system to the brink of collapse.” (“Gimme Shelter,” U.S. Capitalism in Crisis, p. 188)
As the steel, auto, rubber and other major industries literally shut down, millions face the prospect of losing the last stable job they will ever hold under capitalism. Up to their necks in mortgages, loans and credit payments, it means the most devastating plunge in their standard of living in their lives. Houses, cars, college educations for the kids, the whole American Dream built on the false prosperity of the post-war decades, is coming down in the 80’s with an intensity that will tear apart our lives.
Burned into the American psyche as never before, today’s skyrocketing inflation has irreversibly changed not only people’s lives, but the dreams they had for their children’s future. To list its effects on our lives is indeed to catalogue the living hell that is capitalism today.
Start with the basics like food. A shopping cart of groceries that would have cost $10 just ten years ago now costs $22.97, an increase of 130%. For some this means meatless nights, or at least chicken instead of beef. For others, it means no soda and chips for the kids. For the elderly on fixed incomes and the poor on welfare and food stamps, which are now being ruthlessly cut back, it means starvation and death. Driven from a little meat to no meat at all, from canned tuna to dog food, it ends up with one meal a day, composed mainly of starch. With people driven to the brink of starvation and beyond, it means malnutrition and sickness sweep the land as the price of food puts it out of the reach of this society’s most oppressed.
The price of shelter, pushed to record height, has turned necessity into a back-breaking burden. The house, the bedrock of the American Dream, has been snatched from the reach of the vast majority of families. Because of the dependence on credit and the sensitivity of housing costs to interest rates, the cost of shelter reflects a piggyback effect of rising interest rates on top of rising house prices. Thus between 1970 and 1976, while median family income was rising 47% and the overall Consumer Price Index went up 46%, median sales prices for new houses rose 89%, and the monthly ownership cost for a median-priced new house rose 102% while the monthly ownership cost for a median-priced existing house rose 65%. During the 1950s about two-thirds of all families could afford the typical new house, but by 1970 the proportion went down to one-half, and by 1975 to one-quarter. (Ibid.) Today this figure has dropped even lower. In 1977, the median price of a new house was $52,000 and mortgage rates were around 9%. Only three years later, the median cost of a new home is around $62,500 with mortgages, if you can even get one, around 12.75%. (Wall Street Journal, July 10, 1980)
To see how far out of reach the dream of a new home under capitalism has passed, you must understand that while the median family income has risen by about $6,000 since 1970, families actually earn $600 less than they did ten years ago, adjusting for the ravages of inflation. One effect of this is that the suburbs are rapidly dying as the children of homeowners can no longer afford to buy a house comparable to the one they grew up in. A New York Times article, “Suburbia: End of a Golden Age” put it this way:
Suburbia insisted on single-family homes, which account for 85% of the housing in Nassau County, where 50 jurisdictions permit no multi-family units. Ninety-nine percent of Westchester’s residentially zoned land is reserved exclusively for single-family homes. But today the average single-family home simply cannot be afforded by 85% of potential buyers, according to Jay Janis, chairman of the board of the Federal Home Loan Bank.
That and the absence of employment opportunities in many communities are the major factors, according to most experts, that have prevented “turnover,” the replenishment of the suburbs by young families, including the children of the original residents… Taken together, New York’s older suburbs have actually lost population since 1970. The Nassau County housing market is stagnant, with old houses unsold and no new ones being built. ’New housing construction for Long Island basically stopped ten years ago,’ says Steven A. Klar, a Long Island lawyer and real-estate broker. ’Right now, I’m representing more bankers foreclosing mortgages than I am builders.’
Thus the American people’s feeling that their children won’t live as well as they have – under capitalism – is true. They won’t. That part of the capitalist dream is gone forever.
And the ability of the children of the suburbs, and of the country as a whole, to reach or surpass the income levels and status of their parents through a college education is rapidly being closed off. With the ruthless cutting of publicly-funded schools, such as the death of the open admissions system at the City University of New York and the cuts made in government-sponsored education loans, the doors are shut on millions of students. Moreover, with the family budget squeezed more and more and the possibility of saving for the kids’ education wiped out by spiraling inflation, the ability to support the children through college is rapidly diminishing. College education, the road out of the working class for millions in the post-war decades, is now beyond the reach of the American worker’s family. No longer the road of the highly-acclaimed and at the same time time highly illusory “upward mobility,” a college education today remains open only to the relatively privileged petty bourgeoisie. Instead of the open society, the $8,000 per Harvard or Princeton education represents the hardening and more strictly drawn class lines of the 80’s.
The effects of the inflation explosion go on and on: from the fuel and utility bill that has risen 177% in the last ten years, forcing the elderly and poor to choose between eating and keeping warm in the winter (or as the recent heat wave in the Southwest showed, keeping cool enough to survive the summer). . .to the medical bills and doctors’ fees that have risen 117% in ten years, with hospitals closing down or cutting back life-and-death services, literally leaving people to die . . to the hundreds of thousands of farmers forced from their land by the high cost of seed, fertilizer, machines, and feed, threatening the country with even higher costs of food as monopolies squeeze the people more ruthlessly.
Where will it all end? How much more of this bone-crushing inflation can we expect? In an article titled “If the Inflation Rate Tops 25%,” NEXT magazine interviewed noted bourgeois economists: ”’Yes, I believe that superinflation is possible in the United States,’ said Herbert Stein, former chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. ’The political result may be the end of democratic processes and the coming to power of a dictator who promises to end the terrible anxieties of superinflation by establishing a police state.’ .. .Edward Greenberg, professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis, agrees that superinflation is possible, but thinks that controls would not be effective for long. ’In some ways,’ Greenberg continues, ’the United States would not experience the effects of superinflation that other countries have. I visited Israel recently, and there superinflation has prompted an exodus of people with marketable skills. Incomes are higher in other parts of the world with less inflation. But such emigration from the United States is less likely. With our prominence in the market, superinflation would be hard to contain. There would be no countries, to escape to.’...To Robert Theobald, an economist who’s also a futurist, “There is only one certainty in the economic field: The standard forecasts will be wrong.’ And he considers superinflation ’a significant possibility’. Those who argue otherwise ’have not looked at the possibility of a credit explosion that would devalue the currencies of all nations in a very brief period of time .. .’” (NEXT, May/June 1980, p.61)
Wherever there is capitalism, there is unemployment and the decades after World War II were no exception: This is an important indicator of the deterioration of the material conditions of the workers. Contrary to the notion that joblessness went down through the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, in fact more and more people faced the threat of losing their jobs. In the U.S., the number of jobless in 1945 was 1.1 million; in 1955, 2.654 million; in 1968, 2.8 million; and in 1971 it rose to 5 million, a 500% increase in the absolute number of jobless workers in the country since the end of World War II.
By 1975, in the midst of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, joblessness hit nearly 7,900,000 and in 1976 this figure was only reduced to 7,200,000, according to the U.S. government. Between the 1969-1970 recession and the 1974-1975 recession the official unemployment rate dropped to a low of 4.9%. But between 1975 and June 1980, the unemployment rate never dropped below 5.5%, which means that at no point in the last Jive years were less than 5 million workers officially unemployed.
As of this writing, 8 million workers are officially jobless, according to the Wall Street Journal’s July 7, 1980 estimate of June 1980 figures. In this stage of the permanent crisis of U.S. imperialism, however, there is a difference in the nature of unemployment. Unlike previous crises, not only are workers being laid off in industries like auto and steel, but due to the unprecedented stagnation of these sectors, wholesale and permanent plant closings have cut through the industry. Thus workers in steel centers like Youngstown, Ohio and communities like Mahwah, New Jersey where Ford closed it plant, and for those who worked in Detroit’s Dodge Main, this round of layoffs is not just another cyclical event, or as some put it, a forced “vacation.” The stagnation is fundamentally deeper. This time around they may never find another job comparable in pay and stability in their lives under capitalism.
The official unemployment rates actually show only the tip of the iceberg about the true picture of joblessness under capitalism. Today there is a whole stratum of jobless who are permanently unemployed and who will never hold a productive job under capitalism. It is another example of how the crisis today is fundamentally deeper and more extensive than the Great Depression.
According to official statistics, in 1974 there were nearly 26 million people in the U.S., about one out of every nine Americans, who were classified as below “poverty level.” There were 12 million people receiving some form of public assistance. Today, 20.2 million people receive food stamps (U.S. News and World Report, June 30, 1980, p.37)
The trend in this crisis is for more and more workers and poor to be forced into the ranks of the permanently unemployed. For black and other minority youth (and increasingly for white youth as well), whose true jobless rate runs to 50% and more in many communities, this means that they may never know what a steady job and steady income mean as they hop from one lousy McDonald’s job to another.
For workers in dying industries like auto and steel, many will also be forced onto welfare as their unemployment benefits and, as has happened already, their supplemental unemployment benefits, dry up. In fact, this trend was detectable in the 1974-1975 recession. There was a steep rise in a major form of welfare, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The total number of families receiving AFDC payments increased sharply from 1.3 million in 1967 to 3.4 million in 1975. Today, 10 million people get some form of AFDC. This is significant because in order to receive AFDC payments, all unemployment benefits for the family have to be exhausted. Also significantly for the first time in nearly a decade, more than half the families on the welfare rolls are white. White families comprised 50.2% of AFDC recipients, up from 46.9% in 1973 while the number of black families was down from 45.8% to 44.3%. (Herman Thomas, “Impact of the Economic Crisis on Minorities,” U.S. Capitalism in Crisis, pp.81-82)
Though the capitalist system has created a large stratum of permanently unemployed and the deepening stagnation is driving more and more workers into its ranks, the monopoly capitalists are ruthlessly cutting off the funds that keep them alive. Under the guise of welfare reform and “getting the welfare cheaters off the rolls,” the federal and state governments are pruning people from the lists, as well as cutting unemployment benefits and food stamps. The implication is clear – in the crisis of the 80’s, jobless workers have to face the possibility of watching their families starve. As joblessness sweeps the country and inflation drives the cost of food beyond many families’ reach, massive food riots, similar to those in Weimar Germany in the 20’s, will break out. Because a far larger stratum of workers and poor, both black and white, will be jobless, food riots in the 80’s will make the looting of the 60’s seem mild. The choices open to the workers will become ever clearer – starve to death or fight for workers’ rule.
Monopoly capitalism – decaying, moribund and parasitic capitalism – tears at and destroys the social and spiritual fabric in which we live. Today, in the deepest and most extensive economic crisis this country has ever faced, it is doing so in an unparallel-led way. In a more thorough-going way than ever before, the crisis of the 80’s is changing the very lives we lead, how we think and how we act. The effects of the crisis in the social realm, moreover, are not additive. They are exponential.
The American family is under attack by the capitalist system as never before in our history. For every two marriages performed, there is one breaking up in divorce court. Moreover, the number of people living alone and the number of couples having no children are rising and the number of children being born today is dropping. While the number of marriages performed went up 7.3% between 1970 and 1980, the number of divorces mushroomed 65.3%. (U.S. News and World Report, June 16, 1980, p.50)
The impact of the economic crisis on the family is profound. In the crisis of the 80’s, we are caught in the twin grip of inflation and unemployment, which is ripping apart the American family as never before.
The rate of families breaking up today is unparallelled in our history and dwarfs the divorce rate in the Great Depression. Families in the 30’s were relatively stable. Between 1929 and 1939, the divorce rate never rose above 1.9 per 1,000 of population. Today that figure has increased tremendously to over five per 1,000 of population.
Moreover, rising unemployment rates pose a serious threat to the family. Two economists. Heather Ross and Isabel Sawhill, studied data collected between 1968 and 1972 from a national sample of 5,000 families. They found that “separation rates are at least twice as high among families [who] experienced serious unemployment over the three years preceding the start of the survey . . . .The stability of income may be more important than the level in explaining marital outcomes.” (Eli Zaretsky, “The Effects of the Economic Crisis on the Family,” U.S. Capitalism in Crisis, p.215) By this fact alone, the 80’s economic crisis is going to make the Great Depression look like a picnic.
Gnawing at people’s standard of living, inflation is also taking a relentless toll. The Wall Street Journal (May 15, 1980) ran an article indicating the effects of inflation on the stability of the family. The case of Roger and Alice, a couple undergoing treatment in a University of Arizona program, showed how inflation is driving people to the brink. Sometimes when Roger gets home from work and looks through the bills, he flies into a rage so uncontrollable that his wife fears for both their lives. “He gets so frustrated he just starts screaming,” Alice says. “Sometimes he throws things at me. He’s big enough that he could tear a limb off me or choke me to death. I’m afraid he’s going to have a heart attack, or put a bullet through his head.” In Roger’s view, inflation is the cause of much of his mental turmoil. While he earned $15,000 last year, his wage increases didn’t nearly keep pace with his living costs, and the pressure of trying to juggle necessities to make ends meet “is just tearing me apart; you see yourself sinking, and your wife sees you sinking, too.”
The article continued that M. Harvey Brenner, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist, in 1975 found a strong link between unemployment levels and the rates of mental hospital admissions, suicide, violent crimes and death by such causes as heart attacks. He found insufficient evidence, however, to support a direct link between mental illness and inflation. Mr. Brenner now thinks there may be a statistical link. Historically, he notes, inflation has occurred in periods when wages are rising comparably. Last year, by contrast, prices rose 13% while wages and salaries increased just 8.7%. The result: a forced decrease in the standard of living of most Americans. “It’s when inflation is combined with other factors, such as reduced GNP or higher unemployment, that it really packs its punch” on the mental well-being of Americans, Mr. Brenner said. At many clinics, finances are today the fourth most frequently cited problem initially presented to counselors – ranking behind problems with parents, spouses and children but ahead of physical stress, alcoholism, drug addiction and legal difficulties. In the mid-1970s, finances ranked ninth or tenth on the list.
Significantly, the article stated that “perhaps the most dangerous effect of inflation” – and we would add, joblessness – is that it makes people feel helpless, out of touch with their own destinies. The article said those most vulnerable to this type of stress are people who have “characterological disorders,” mental imbalances under which they see themselves “as victims and which makes them likely to lash out.” According to the article, rape and child abuse are possible consequences of this.
The reality is that the victims are not only the objects of attack, but “attackers.” Warped by capitalism, unable to direct their anger at the real source of their desperation and destitution, the monopoly capitalists, people inevitably lash out at anybody available. Thus, the Sons of Sam, the workers who shoot their foremen and fellow workers after being laid off, the youth who go berserk and shoot their parents (as happened recently in Brooklyn) – these represent the murderous toll of the crisis of the 80’s. And they are saying the same thing as the unemployed steelworker in Michigan facing eviction from his trailer who held his children hostage with a shotgun: “I hate this country.”
Thus unlike the 30’s, the worker’s family today is not nearly as able to cushion the effects of the present economic crisis. The main reason for this is that the decay of imperialist culture since that time has ripped our social and cultural fabric to shreds.
The temporary stabilization of U.S. capitalism after World War II and false prosperity bred deep and deadly illusions among workers in this country. As Jerry Tung has said, “It was a sad time for the U.S. working class. Workers did not even see themselves as workers, but as part of the ’middle class’. We sent our sons off to war thinking it was good for us and mortgaged the future of our sons and daughters thinking it was prosperity. And now the chickens are coming home to roost in the 80’s.”
Caught up in the race to get the first new house, the first new car and send the first kid to college, workers were overall indifferent to the political scene around them. Most important, they were left leaderless by the reformist politics of the Communist Party, U.S.A., which sold out to the monopoly capitalists in the late 50’s.
Art and culture during the 50’s reflected and promoted the political backwardness of the time. It was characterized by, on the one hand, the anti-communism whipped up by the bourgeoisie during the McCarthy era and, on the other, by the “celebration of America,” as C. Wright Mills put it. After Hollywood had been cleansed of communists and other progressives, the local double feature consisted of John Wayne hunting communists or Native Americans, and Doris Day leading a mindless petty bourgeois existence in the suburbs. In between, the newsreel showed Eisenhower, the epitome of “normalcy,” playing golf in any number of U.S.-dominated foreign countries. The racist romanticism of Rodgers and Hammerstein dominated the screen, and like the false prosperity of the period, seemed able to go on forever. The euphoria of the 50’s reached its height in the Kennedy years, when Camelot seemed to have come true (but was political life imitating art for the bourgeoisie’s purely pragmatic reasons).
Then, after the sell-out of Khruschev to the U.S., Kennedy went on the offensive world-wide. Soon the newsreels were showing pictures of a little-known country called Vietnam to U.S. audiences. The political calm of the 50’s was suddenly shattered by the bullets of a presidential assassination, the explosion of black people’s resistance in places like Watts and the rising tide of anti-war and student movements. These were partial movements, to be sure, with the vast majority of workers non-participants. But after the stagnant political atmosphere of the 50’s and early 60’s, they were a breath of fresh air.
It was the Vietnam war that ripped the social fabric of this country apart. Starting among students and youth, the movement it spawned shattered old prejudices and old values. It brazenly defied the government and declared all old authority bankrupt. It declared the idea of abstinence, working your way up and saving for the future to be futile. Seeking to do its own thing, it declared drugs “mind-expanding,” and sexual promiscuity “liberating.” Hard-driving rock and soul music knocked classical and easy listening out of the musical box to the point where both the New York Philharmonic’s Bernstein and Boston Pops’ Fiedler had to play the Beatles to seem “relevant.”
All manifestations of liberalism, reformism and utopianism were brought to the fore by the bourgeoisie under the guise of being “anti-establishment.” This was reflected in the movies of the day: The Graduate, Woodstock, Strawberry Statement, Alice’s Restaurant, MASH and even Che. Like the spontaneity of the movements, art and culture of the period reflected the grip of the bourgeois world outlook on them, and the new progressive forms which emerged could not rise above the essentially bourgeois content. As long as they represented essentially a loyal opposition within the framework of bourgeois democracy and reformism, the bourgeoisie could use them to keep the masses from taking a revolutionary path.
That is not to say, however, that the prevailing changes in values and attitudes were a plot by the bourgeoisie. While the bourgeoisie cannot totally determine social trends among the masses, they can certainly use parts to serve their interests.
This is exactly what they did with the trends of the 60’s and early 70’s. To cool out the movements, on the one hand they pushed illusory liberalism and carried out partial and temporary reforms, funded through deficit financing, itself illusory and temporary. On the other hand, they murdered revolutionary leaders like Malcolm X and Fred Hampton and jailed hundreds more. But their war was also fought in the realm of propaganda, to affect the people ideologically.
After the overthrow of the old ideas and moral authority of established institutions, there was a cultural vacuum. Certainly the period was a time when the old order was turned upside down, but lacking the science of Marxism to explain what had happened and what road to take, disorientation set in among the masses.
Pessimism, non-resistance, appeals to the ’spirit’ constitute an ideology inevitable in an epoch when the whole of the old order ’has been turned upside-down’, and when the masses, who have been brought up under this old order, who imbibed with their mother’s milk the principles, the habits, the traditions, the beliefs of this order, do not and cannot see what kind of a new order is ’taking shape’, what social forces are ’shaping’ it, and how, what social forces are capable of bringing release from the incalculable and exceptionally acute distress that is characteristic of epochs of upheaval. (Lenin, “Lev Tolstoi and His Epoch,” Collected Works, Vol. 17, p.51)
The bourgeoisie rushed to fill this cultural vacuum. They took hold of “free love” and used it to push the most degrading and disgusting pornography, flooding the country with porn shops and putting Playboy, Hustler and Penthouse in the local drugstore. Promiscuity has been promoted as the norm. The drug culture became a lethal tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the biggest pusher of all. Minority communities, youth and factories are inundated by a tidal wave of dope – from grass to pills to smack. On top of 10 to 18 million estimated alcoholics in the U.S., according to the government, 49 million men and women have used tranquilizers, 27 million have used sedatives and 17 million have used stimulants. (U.S. News and World Report, May 1, 1978, p.83) Youth are especially affected as they look for an escape from the miseries and aimlessness of life under capitalism. Drug use has become a plague. For example, the percentage of students who smoked marijuana among the total number of students in the country was 5% in 1967 and 42% in 1970. The percentage of those who take amphetamines and other uppers was 1 % in the spring of 1967 and 40% in December 1970. And these ten-year-old statistics are certainly dwarfed by today’s rates. The tale of the ten- or 12-year-old junkie is tragically not even newsworthy. Grass, speed, dust, smack, and coke are more a part of youth’s everyday life today than mom and apple pie.
It was also in this time that the cry of “do your own thing” – the slogan of the petty bourgeoisie – was picked up by the bourgeoisie to push all forms of individualism, self-pity and petty bourgeois introspection. In the 60’s and early 70’s it represented the cry for freedom from the repressive institutions of monopoly capitalism – the government, big corporations, unresponsive bureaucracies in the universities, etc. One consequence was the whipping-up of the above-class “generation gap.” But near the end of the war in Southeast Asia, when the mass movements ebbed and a wave of “resignation” swept over the petty bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie played up “doing your own thing,” harping on the pessimistic mood swing. The most reactionary trends started to grow in U.S. art and culture: hard-core pornography touted as high art combined with and complementing pessimism, as in Last Tango in Paris and Chinatown; mysticism and the occult, characterized by the box office hit The Exorcist and a whole slew of its kind, from Rosemary’s Baby to Omen; the glorification of violence combined with American pragmatism in Dirty Harry, The Godfather and Death Wish; the chauvinist rewriting of the history of the war in Southeast Asia in The Deer Hunter, where the bourgeoisie manipulates the audience by twisting our emotional involvement with the main characters and gets people to cheer when the Vietnamese are cut down; and of course the fascination with fascism, as in Francis Ford Coppola’s recent release, Our Hitler. These are but a sampling.
* * *
Today, buffeted on all sides by the products of decaying imperialist ideology, and now facing the catastrophic effects of the 80’s economic crisis, institutions like the family have been attacked as never before. Individualism, the search for an illusory and anti-social freedom under capitalism, drugs and sexual licentiousness – all symptoms of the ideological crisis we face today – have broken families and other social ties. Just as poison as the toxic chemicals in Love Canal, these reactionary trends come from the same source – monopoly capitalism. And only workers’ rule, where the ruthless dog-eat-dog outlook of capitalism is eliminated and mindless escapes from a living hell are unnecessary, can turn human relations right-side-up and heal the deep wounds inflicted by capitalist society.
The growth of the occult in the movies again was a reflection, and the promotion, of a rising social trend of “born again” religion. As the established values were assaulted, some turned to “born again” religion and the occult to fill the vacuum.
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of the spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. (Marx and Engels, On Religion, p.38)
One particularity of the U.S. is the number of fundamentalist sects which preach the literal interpretation of the Bible, prophecy, faith-healing and proselytizing. In the last decade, sects such as the Moonies, the TV preachers and the Church of Scientology have grown tremendously. According to the Wall Street Journal (July 11, 1980), ”Some 27 million people, mostly in the South and the Midwest, call themselves evangelicals. Several million of them are Protestants who have grown disenchanted with the teachings of their mainline churches such as the Episcopal and the Presbyterian. A parallel movement among Roman Catholics, the ’Charismatic Renewal’, has attracted 4 million followers since its founding in 1967. Overall, one out of every three Americans says he has been ’born again’, according to a recent Gallup Poll. And every week television evangelists like Oral Roberts, Rex Hambard, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell reach an estimated 128 million viewers.” Meanwhile, traditional churches have lost 3 million members, 15% of their membership.
It’s no secret why these sects are growing. Arising from the barbaric semi-feudal conditions of the South, fundamentalism has been prominent in American life in times of great upheaval and crisis like the 30’s. It feeds on the desperation and panic of the masses. Now, “the rapid rate of technological change, the high rate of unemployment, the economic uncertainty, these are all things that drive people to religion–and to drink,’’ says Dean Kelly, an official with the National Council of Churches and author of “Why Conservative Churches are Growing.” This expression of the disorientation of the masses can be turned to fascist directions, as it was by the anti-communist radio preacher Father Coughlin in the Depression era and is by the Moonies today. Through its demagoguery fundamentalism can feed fascism by whipping up issues like abortion and the “right to life” movement, which the government uses to pit people against each other as in the recent Supreme Court ruling.
For all the suffering borne by people, we have not seen a massive strike wave like the one that began in 1933 or even the wave of mass uprisings in the urban ghettoes in the 60’s. A strange situation indeed – accelerating mass impoverishment and destitution on the one hand and on the other absence of widespread mass resistance.
In fact, this was also typical of the first three years of the Great Depression. According to William Z. Foster,
.. .during the first three and a half years of the crisis, until Roosevelt’s New Deal, the great mass of the workers did not develop any real resistance, while the employers brutally shoved the burden of the crisis upon them and their families by mercilessly slashing their wages and reducing living standards generally. And the trade union [mis]leaders, by their surrender policies, actually helped the employers in this savage attack. Through this period of wholesale worsening of the workers’ conditions there were fewer strikes than there had been for many years previously. In 1930, for example, there was only one-tenth as many strikes as in the corresponding crisis year of 1922.
The situation in Chicago was typical of that prevailing throughout the entire United States. Despite the fact that the workers of that city had many militant traditions and strong labor unions and fully 50% of industrial workers were thrown out of work and the rest had their wages cut from 20% to 50%, there was not a single strike of any importance whatever in the first three years of crisis. (American Trade Unionism, p. 187)
Today we are leaderless. Without recognized and respected leadership there is a vacuum of moral authority. No longer able to look to traditional leaders and with the old moral authority shattered, the American people are disoriented as never before.
For instance, as we said in Workers Viewpoint (June 30, 1980), most unions today are like empty shells. Most have the basis to be genuine fighting, democratic unions, but the labor aristocrats strangle them. Some unions like ACTWU (Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union) and ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) are not even shells, having no organized steward/committeeman system through which the workers can be mobilized.
Today the labor aristocrats are so hated and exposed that they are losing control. The new ”militants” like in the United Steelworkers are also losing control of recently-won leadership positions. Yet, as the New York City transit workers’ strike showed, no one dared to assume leadership and say, ”No, we will not go back to work” when the union bureaucrats maneuvered a sell-out contract. With all the militant dissidents in the Transit Workers Union, there was still no clear leadership able to smash and replace the hacks. By default, the contract was rammed through. Frustrated and cynical, some workers have tuned out and turned off to their unions, even in this unprecedented crisis.
This is the deepest capitalist economic crisis ever and the number of strikes is actually almost the lowest in the last two decades. Stunned, disoriented and leaderless, the vast majority of workers are still absorbing the full brunt of the capitalist crisis.
The open signs of mass resistance are lacking; however, there is an apparent paradox. The American people have not taken to the streets in droves (with a few exceptions like Levittown, Miami, and recent Chattanooga), but they are in fact awakening to political life by the millions and tens of millions. Unlike any time in the last thirty years, the vast majority is open to political ideas, listening intently to all shades of political opinion. In every living room, in every corner bar, a great debate on every question is raging over the politics of the 80’s. That the American people will at some time soon vote with their feet is certain. They are trying to decide now what they are going to “vote” for.
An important sign of this is the mercury-like state of public opinion in the last year. On a number of issues, hitting with machine-gun rapidity, public opinion polarized strongly with almost no middle ground. Moreover, unlike the one or two great issues of the past, like the Korean War in the 50’s, the civil rights and black liberation movements in the 60’s, the war in Southeast Asia and Watergate, polarization took place on a number of great issues in a very short period of time. Indeed it seemed like 20 years of public opinion was squeezed into one.
Jerry Tung has stated,
It is clear today, the masses are really being polarized. On November 3, 1979, after five of our comrades were killed, it suddenly appeared to many serious-minded revolutionary people around the country that this is a whole different scene altogether. This thing is getting serious. Then a day later was Iran – the Iranian people took the hostages because of CIA involvement in the U.S. embassy and the whole country went into a commotion. Then there was Soviet social-imperialism’s invasion of Afghanistan a couple of weeks later. Immediately after that, U.S. imperialism responded with a boycott of the Olympics and people started to take sides. Should we go to the Moscow Olympics or not? People took sides. Then Carter announced registration for the draft and the students once more became involved.
So, in the last few months, you can see the wild swings in the mood of the American people. And this kind of swing, from one day to another, is something rarely seen in the last 30 years. In fact, in the 70’s and 60’s, there were issues which affected people and divided them up – families on two different sides – such as the civil rights struggle and the war in Vietnam. People sided, polarized by the issues. But what you see today is more than siding on one or two issues. It’s siding on many, many issues. In the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, people took sides, but knew fundamentally their lives would not necessarily change. Even if their kids got killed in Vietnam, somehow or other they thought their lives could continue as usual. They did not face the kind of difficulties they face today. So it’s clear today people are being affected. People know that they can no longer be indifferent towards the whole thing. Like the housewife in Love Canal said, ’I wish to be just a housewife, but they wont leave me atone!’ The pollution, and all those things. Today even the backward strata of people, the people who have been totally indifferent before, they are drawn into politics. Like in California, they have proposition 9, proposition 13, proposition this, proposition that. At the same time, people don’t vote any more; you know, people say, ‘What’s the difference between Carter and Kennedy?’ So it’s clear more and more people are becoming indifferent towards voting, but at the same time, people get into this proposition thing. Why is that? The reason is because those propositions are not just a question of voting for a president and no matter who you voted tor, basically the outcome is the same. They carry out the same policies. But those propositions affect your lives directly. Your social programs will be cut off. Your house taxes will increase. As a result, people become polarized around those things. So people cannot afford to be indifferent any more. The historic lever of the economic crisis and the polarization, issue after issue, are hitting them so hard and so fast that they begin to have to take sides. This is independent of their will, whether they’re interested in politics or not. And it’s affecting them so close, in their families, in their homes that they have to take positions.
That’s one of the laws of Marxism which says, ’there are masses and masses’. In a period of relative stabilization of capitalism, the masses who are open to us, who are open to the class struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat, to overthrow the U.S. government, is limited. Those people who are open to us are limited to tens of thousands. But today because the historic lever of the economic crisis is acting up in such a thorough-going way, and people are getting hit and forced to take stand on Olympics, Iran, on this and on that in such a forceful way, masses in millions of people, not in tens of thousands, but in terms of hundreds of millions are becoming political. They are becoming political. They are becoming open. They’re disoriented, and they’re starting to question.
The question is: how do we deal with this polarization? This is related to the character of our work. Should we still do what we did in the 60’s and 70’s – try first to win the confidence of fellow workers, neighbors, that you’re a nice guy, a staunch fighter, that you stand with them? Then after winning the personal confidence, you tell them you’re a communist and that’s what you believe in. That approach was necessary in the period of capitalist stabilization or in the period of relative capitalist equilibrium, like in the 70’s before the period of rapid capitalist destabilization. But this approach is no longer correct. In fact, it will become very, very negative, because it will not be strong, enough and sharp enough to really reach out to the majority of the American people, two hundred million of them. So our approach is that, in terms of character of Party’s task, we must meet the polarization head-on. You must take propaganda, the Party’s line, Out there and run the line from to morning to evening. You gotta run it. Otherwise it will not be strong enough. People’s families are being affected by the crisis in such a thorough-going way. People’s families are breaking apart. People are losing their jobs. Their kids may never get jobs, from their perspective, in their lifetimes. They face losing their houses, and even their cars. In a situation like that, if you don’t run the line now, they won’t remember you six days later. You’ll just be another person. So you must run the line now. You cannot just talk about you’re affected by the crisis because you’re a worker. You’re affected by the crisis because you’re Afro-American or you’re affected by this crisis because nuclear power is coming. You cannot deal with it one issue at a time anymore. You have to run the full line. You have to explain to them the crisis of capitalism, and then show the relation of all those other things to it. Otherwise the line will not be sharp enough and the leadership will not be strong enough for them.
If we don’t meet this polarization problem right now, the bourgeoisie will polarize people along their way. As I explained before, in the last several months Iran hit, and I think for many of us it’s the first time that experience has shown us a mood like that in this country, where you have spraypaint all over the streets: ’Death to Iranians’ and ’Send the Iranians Back’. Prior to that, there was the Bakke decision, so-called reverse discrimination. Then you had Cuba, Cuban refugees, Haitian refugees, the boat people – all the issues which the bourgeoisie and their media used to polarize people along their way. So in this period, if we do not explain and put in the context of the whole capitalist system, why these things are coming about, then the bourgeoisie will gradually win people over to their side. That’s why this is the time, when Lenin said the masses need an immediate outlet for their anger and frustration. If we do not provide the outlet, if we do not provide the channel, if we do not provide the leadership and organization for them to crystallize their frustration, anger and energy, then the bourgeoisie will. The frustration, anger and energy will be channeled to a non-communist channel, and that will be a fascist channel. This is the situation we face.
You must penetrate people’s conditioned response. People’s conditioned response is when they see bigshots come in, with helicopters, SWAT teams, limousines and bigshot politicians kissing each other, people applaud and everything. People are awed, even though they don’t like him, have no confidence in him. They’ll still sit there and applaud him, and other people will applaud him. That’s the conditioned response of the American people...
The revolution will be violent. There’s no other way. That’s not up to us, the bourgeoisie wants it that way. There’s no other way out for us but we can make it less bloody if we’re prepared, if we provide sharp line and strong leadership today.
Sharp line means run the line from morning to night, every day, to everybody you meet. That’s what sharp line means. Strong leadership means you have to lead by example like the Kokomo action, by heroic example like our five comrades. Probably you see on TV every day what we’ve done. In the South we indicted the bourgeois courts. We put them on notice: ’No way, you’re not going to judge us. Who do you think you are to judge us? We’re going to put you on trial.’ That’s strong leadership. That’s the kind of sharp line and strong leadership required for the coming period. In order to do that, you have to grasp the objective situation and the main obstacle is our partial experiences and what we call bourgeois realism. That’s natural. That affects both you and me. But you must not be limited by appearance, by conditioned responses. As a communist, you must see through, penetrate those conditioned responses. You must see the real sentiment of the majority of American people. And you must provide the sharp line and strong leadership because that’s the only thing that will appeal to the majority. Anything less than that, you’re talking to the liberals, among the reformers, and you’re kidding yourself. So what we’re doing is not radical, extreme or unpopular. It’s popular! What we’re doing is not extreme. What we do is in the interest of the vast majority.
You must penetrate beyond your own immediate experiences, what you see in appearances, like when the students applauded Kennedy, and you think that if you stood up to agitate, you would not be applying ’mass line’. Your mass line is a superficial mass line. It does not express how people feel inside, deep down inside. And that’s not the sharp line and strong leadership the Party asks you to provide. We want you to speak to the majority of American people and you must speak to the objective situation and sentiments at hand.
Let me say what will happen if you don’t provide that kind of leadership. Disorientation. I mentioned earlier that this Nazi guy, Covington, got 56,000 votes in North Carolina and Metzger won the Democratic nomination for congressman in southern California. If you examine the people who voted for him, carefully, you will see that some people didn’t even know they were Nazi and Klan. There were Afro-Americans who voted for Covington. Why? Later they started to apologize and wrote letters to the newspaper saying, i didn’t know the guy was Nazi.’ By the way, the hometowns of Covington and Metzger did not give them any votes. They were hated in their hometowns. Like Metzger said recently, ’I live in a town with all the wetbacks. Nobody works except me. Everyone gets a government paycheck in one form or another. I’m the only one who works for a living.’ He’s trying to justify his unpopularity in his hometown. People know those hate-types. People know those racist-types. So when they know them, they don’t vote for them. But the fact is a lot of people were deceived and voted for them because first of all they didn’t know who they are. There were people who knew them and consciously voted for them because they were polarized against the immigrants, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Cubans, the Iranians, the blacks. There are people who consciously voted for them. But there are people who voted for them because they thought that at least they’re not in the mainstream of politics. They’re not like Kennedy and Carter who lie through their teeth. They tell it like it is, they feel. They saw some of the things they said and it seemed down-to-earth. They thought, ’Hey, maybe I should go for a change’, not knowing what they stand for and what their program is. That’s the extent of die disorientation today.
I want to be polemical on this point: because some of the people who voted for Covington and Metzger could vote for us today, could support us today. That’s how volatile, how open the situation is. That’s why if you don’t reach out with sharp line and strong leadership and sacrifice now like you’ve never sacrificed in your lives, some of these people will be won over to the right, to the side of the bourgeoisie, to the side of fascism. So the character of preparation is, we must run the line, and propaganda is our chief form of activity now, instead of waiting for the thing to come forward, waiting for the revolutionary situation to outpour, when all hell breaks loose.