A right turn in U.S. politics?

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Socialist Action decemBER 2010 3 Following the Republican victory in last month’s mid-term election, most of the media have pointed to a right turn in U.S. politics. They assume that working people showed by their vote that they reject “big government” and the “liberal” policies of the Obama administration.

The ultra-right Tea Party did secure a high level of influence in the Republican Party. The Tea Party leadership rests in the hands of reactionary and even white racist forces; but the base of the movement is more complex. Many are older, white “middle class” people concerned with rising taxes, who were manipulated by claims of a “government takeover of health care” and government-controlled “death panels.” Some of them, because of their reliance on government programs like Medicare and Social Security, might be won to a broad defense of these programs against the coming wave of austerity measures and cutbacks.

The truth is that both capitalist parties campaigned on a program of austerity and budget cutting. This goes for the incoming “liberal” Democratic governors of California and New York—Brown and Cuomo. It should also be noted that no major party candidates made an issue of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Democrats could have urged a shifting of war dollars to creating jobs at home, funding education and health care, and rebuilding the infrastructure, but that was not on their pro-corporate, pro-imperialist agenda.

The Democrats have accommodated themselves to right-wing attacks on Muslims and stepped up attacks on immigrant workers. For example, an incumbent Democratic state representative in Pennsylvania went so far as to visit construction sites to check the papers of workers. Democrats included language about “getting tough” with so-called illegal aliens in their campaigns.

Polls show that the Tea Party has the support of about 18% of the population. Interestingly, other polls show that about 30% of the U.S. population thinks that socialism is a good idea. Of course, many of these folks don’t understand what socialism means. This represents an opportunity to explain more fully what the socialist alternative would look like.

These numbers show not so much a rightward swing in U.S. politics as a lack of clarity amongst working people and the middle classes. The election does not ... Workers (continued from page 1: “Obama, Congress call for austerity; U.S. workers are their prime target”) that “everything is on the table” for possible cuts. This is necessitated by state funding gaps of more than $425 billion and surging borrowing costs for states (and cities as well). Governors of both parties, of course, ruled out tax increases on the rich.

On a level less noticeable to workers not typically informed of class-wide events, but no less insidious, bosses around the country continue their one-company-ata-time imposition of cuts. One increasingly common scheme is the imposition of permanent two-tier labor schemes.

Louis Uchitelle reported in The New York Times on Nov. 19, “Even at manufacturing companies that are profitable, union workers are reluctantly agreeing to tiered contracts that create two levels of pay.” In recent decades such schemes were presented as temporary measures until profitability returned. But increasingly employers are dropping the pretense and admitting they are imposing a permanent second tier with lower wages, benefits, worse work rules, casual status or no union membership—just because they can. In some cases, workers in the higher tier will be stuck into the lower one if called back after a layoff.

The result of such cuts is already showing in booming corporate profits, which are up 28% over the past year, and reached an all-time high (although not adjusted for inflation) in the third quarter. Profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters.

Part of the profit boom is due to comparisons with last year’s low levels, especially the disastrous balance sheets of financial companies that took huge write-downs on bad investments. Another part, however, is their successful use of the crisis to squeeze workers. Thus businesses’ spending on compensation for employees rose only 7.6%. Economists also attribute the rise in part to stronger productivity (i.e., more goods turned out by fewer workers), as well as to rapidly expanding markets in countries such as India and China. represent a massive turn into the Republican Party. Instead, it appears that the mass base of the Democrats, demoralized and unmotivated, stayed home. On the other side, the ultra-right turned out its supporters. But the truth is that only 40% of the electorate bothered to vote, which shows a lack of faith in either capitalist party to solve the problems we face.

Without a firm political anchor in a working-class program and organization, voters will always tend to swing back and forth to punish those in power. I would caution against writing a premature obituary for the Democrats. In 2006, voters rejected the policies of the GOP by giving the Democrats a majority in both the Senate and the House. This majority was further enhanced in the 2008 election when Obama was elected. Afterward, the talking heads on TV talked about the “end” of the Republican Party and other such nonsense.

This trend shows that neither capitalist party is capable of offering any solutions to the crisis; only a continuation of war and austerity. This is why we have to link the “war at home” (one-sided class war against workers and the oppressed) and the war over there. This is what makes building the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) so crucial. The contradictions of this system are sharpening, and we are presented with the opportunity to build a fightback on issues that millions of working people feel are important to their lives.

We also need an uncompromising fight for independence from the parties of the ruling class. The Democrats are as much a part of the institutional set-up of U.S. capitalism as the Republicans. While the Republicans tend to be more reactionary on the surface, the Democrats have the function of disorienting and confusing opposition. They attempt to draw the leadership of mass movements into a relationship based on “access” and “influence,” and the working class gets sold out. To put it bluntly; the Democratic Party is where the peoples’ movements go to die.

In the recent election, the pro-Democratic Party “left” tried to play up the boogieman of an impending rightwing takeover led by the likes of Glen Beck and Sarah Nonetheless, said Paul Dales of Capital Economics, “The [U.S.] economy is not growing fast enough to reduce significantly the unemployment rate or to prevent a slide into deflation. This is unlikely to change in 2011 or 2012.”

What’s more, such profits, as they are not based on a revival of system-wide consumption and production, can’t last— just as the very modest return to growth in GDP this year is merely a temporary upswing before the next, and likely far more severe, return to absolute decline in GDP. Dependence on China and other growing markets is running up against limits there as well.

Even in the midst of this temporary return to profitability, the Federal Reserve said in late November that the official unemployment rate would still be at least 8% when the next presidential election arrives, in late 2012. And as we go to press, Congress appears likely to refuse to extend unemployment benefits, meaning millions will enter the holiday season facing eviction and hunger.

In contrast to the nationwide revolts in some European countries, as well as a Palin. But how do we stop the far right? Certainly not by accommodating ourselves to their program at every turn.

After the election defeat, Obama said he hoped to work with the Republicans to move things forward. He spoke favorably about seeking a “bipartisan” unity to balance the budget and “fix” programs like Social Security. Concretely, this means an all-out offensive against programs that millions of people depend on.

This is the purpose of the Obama Deficit Commission—to sell major cuts in programs like Social Security and Medicare in the name of fiscal responsibility. Forget raising taxes on the rich or solutions that favor working people.

More than anything, this election reflected a reaction by the mass of voters to the perceived inaction of the party that promised “change” and then did little to achieve it. Millions have lost jobs, and millions more fear the loss of their jobs. They see the foreclosure crisis and bank bailouts while nothing is done for the most vulnerable. They see an economy that creates few jobs; and those it does create are low-wage, no benefit jobs—often part time.

They see a union movement that gives millions of dollars and thousands of volunteer hours to the Democrats but has done little to oppose concessions and trade deals or to defend the interests of the broader working class. There was no fight for EFCA, no fight for a substantial increase in the minimum wage, no mobilization for a real health-care bill, and no opposition to the wars that are draining this economy. After all, we can’t embarrass our “friends” the Democrats!

Bourgeois elections decide very little. The mass activity of the working class and the oppressed on the other 364 days of the year is what makes the difference.

The way forward is not easy. We have several key interlinked tasks ahead of us—to build a mass antiwar movement that ties the social and economic crisis at home to the wars over there, to rebuild a class-struggle wing in the unions, and ultimately to form a mass party of working people and the oppressed that is capable of struggling for political power. n recent nationwide public-worker strike in South Africa, resistance to the rulers’ policies in the U.S. has been as fragmented as the cuts imposed on them in bits and pieces. But there are small signs of resistance, including ones that could be a precursor to an overall working-class fightback.

Militant autoworkers, for instance, continue efforts to combine resistance to attacks in their particular industry with advocacy for nationwide plans to boost employment while reversing climate damage. Their campaign was described in a Labor Notes article concerning a meeting of UAW dissidents planning resistance to union President Bob King’s “collaborative” policies in bargaining for next year’s contracts.

The journal reported that Al Benchich, retired president of UAW Local 909, noted that a gathering of the activists was held “in the shadow of a large wind turbine generator and adjacent to a solar panel farm—the kind of green products that Autoworkers Caravan [the dissidents’ organization] has advocated be produced at converted auto plants.” n

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TPetros Karadjis / AP (Left) Protesters battled police outside Greek parliament after lawmakers approved drastic austerity cuts, May 6.

of leading political personalities. The working class, and especially the so-called new working class—composed of mostly educated, precariously employed people, scarcely represented by the traditional unions— by no means abstained from the struggles against capital.

In fact, Greece’s new proletariat had a heavy record of resistance, involving such major events as the most massive and radical student movement of the last decades against the commodification of education, in 2006-2007, and the social revolt of December 2008—on the occasion of Alexandros Gregoropoulos’ assassination by a cop, which shook the country and seriously threatened its political stability. These new layers of the working class were the main targets of the ruling class’s strategies for increased discipline.

Last spring, the government successfully passed the most extreme anti-labor bills that Greek capitalists had ever dreamed of—at least during the last 30 years. The measures included wage reductions in the public sector, new legislation with regard to social security and health care that involved the increase of the retirement age, etc.

The organized labor movement was unable to draw an effective line of resistance. After six general strikes—one of which, held on May 5, was perhaps