Ronald Reagan: Capitalism’s man of the hour

by Michael Schreiber

Ronald Reagan bowed out hours before the D-Day anniversary, a timely moment for his successor, George W. Bush, who was visiting the World War II battlefields in France at the time.

The blanketing of the capitalist media with tributes to the former president, coupled with patriotic D-Day photo-ops for the current occupant of the White House, served handily to deflect attention from the administration’s mounting failures in Iraq.

Republican and Democratic politicians joined in a chorus of praise for Reagan. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, for example, issued a full-page statement extolling Reagan’s optimism and resolve. “Ronald Reagan’s love of country was infectious, Kerry said.

The corporate news media was no less effusive in its praise. CBS anchor Dan Rather said of the man who claimed The Readers’ Digest as his principal reading matter: “President Reagan led the West in the decisive hour in a long battle for the survival of Western culture, Western ideas and ideals.”

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and a liberal critic of Reagan, tried to explain the hype:

“The Great Communicator, as he was called, was capable of charming millions of Americans with his soothing, grandfatherly demeanor. In 1984 there were polls indicating that most of those who voted to re-elect him disagreed with him on the issues. In short, the ‘Reagan revolution’ would probably never have happened without his unrivaled leadership skills.”

The capitalist school of “political science” puts great stress on the role of the individual in history. But Marxists (or scientific socialists) see individual behavior as subordinate to the operation of broad economic forces that drive society forward and sometimes backward.

In truth, Reagan was the man of the capitalist hour, its prime spokesperson, but only to the extent that he was expert at reading its prepared script.

He was not the architect of capitalism’s policies. These are determined by the real rulers of U.S. society, a tiny band of multi-billionaire corporate owners. This grouping is driven by the urgent needs of America’s capitalist class as a whole as it faces strong economic competition from Europe and Japan.

Propping up U.S. capitalism

World War II ended with the physical destruction of the economic infrastructure of America’s enemies and allies alike. The U.S., in contrast, untouched by a war that took the lives of 50 million, touted an industrial infrastructure running at full throttle, capable of dominating world markets for what proved to be approximately three decades.

In the early 1970s, a rebuilt Europe and Japan began to mount a serious challenge to American capitalism. Based on state-of-the-art technology employed in key industries ranging from steel and auto to computers and plastics, U.S. corporations, some still operating plants from the previous century, saw profit rates decline precipitously. Significant sectors of the U.S. economy proved incapable of competing effectively on world markets.

Richard Nixon was the first postwar president to directly respond to the needs of faltering U.S. corporations. His wage-price freeze legislation ran through Congress with zero resistance. U.S. capital had established its first bulwark against its foreign competitors. The Jimmy Carter administration followed suit with legislative attacks on labor and social cutbacks that resulted in the AFL-CIO bureaucracy adopting a virtually neutral position during the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential election contest.

But it was Ronald Reagan who lent full force to the U.S. ruling-class drive to regain superiority in the face of the rapidly expanding and modernized European and Japanese capitalism. To that end, Reagan instituted a program of massive deficit spending by the federal government (lavished mainly on corporations producing military weapons and equipment), coupled with a renewed drive to use U.S. military dominance to fortify and expand Washington’s political and economic power over much of the world.

For the record, Reagan pledged fealty to the conservative “cut government spending and balance the budget” mantra. In action, he presided over federal budgets ranging from $128 billion to over $200 billion in deficits for each year of his administration.

Adjusted for inflation, Reagan spent more on the military than any U.S. president to this day. Military spending under capitalism serves a dual function; it advances U.S. imperialism’s capacity to extend and dominate world markets via the gun, while it also serves, Keynesian style, to prop up failing industries at home whose technology is inferior to foreign competitors.

The Reagan-era $640 submarine toilet seat served as an example of the super-profits derived from the monopoly-controlled military-industrial complex. Simply put, when worldwide competition reduces profits on competitive products to historically low levels, capitalists find other ways to support flagging corporations—military spending being at the top of the list.

The hundreds of billions of dollars expended for Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars” program, were designed to line the pockets of the military-industrial complex while supposedly researching a program that was devoid of scientific credibility.

More than two decades later, the U.S. military has yet to demonstrate the capacity to consistently shoot down a single long-range strategic missile, not to mention the 25,000 in the hands of the Soviet military during the Reagan years. Yet Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, shook the world with his assertion that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union would be “winnable.”

Reagan greatly expanded the work of previous administrations to dismantle, de-regulate, and privatize domestic social services. As Reagan lashed out at so-called “welfare queens,” a racist euphemism for the mainly Black and Hispanic single mothers who were forced to rely on public programs to provide sustenance for their families, he sliced taxes for the country’s billionaires. Under Reagan the tax rate for those in the top income brackets fell from 70 percent to 36 percent.

Accordingly, the flow of wealth to the upper echelons of the capitalist class greatly accelerated. In 1979, under President Carter, the top 1 percent of the population held 22 percent of the country’s wealth; after Reagan’s term, in 1989, they held 39 percent.

At the same time, poverty increased; 32 million people were counted below the official poverty level by 1988. The number of homeless Americans skyrocketed, exceeding 2 million by 1988, as Reagan slashed the budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development by three-quarters during his administration. Communities constructed out of cardboard boxes, dubbed “Reaganvilles” by the homeless who lived in them, sprouted around the country. Reagan’s administration imposed deep cuts in education spending, for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and for food stamps.

His insistence that “ketchup is a vegetable” was used to justify cuts in school lunch programs. In each instance his policies were designed to transfer working-class tax dollars from needed social services to the corporate elite.

And it was Ronald Reagan who shocked the U.S. labor movement in 1981 when he fired 12,000 striking air traffic controllers. The destruction of the PATCO union was the opening gun of an assault on labor that continues to this day.

Red-baiter and racist

In his youth, like many in the film industry during the 1930s, Reagan oriented to liberal politics and was a great admirer of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the 1950s, however, as the chief officer of the Screen Actor’s Guild, he joined the McCarthyite witch hunters to red-bait and drive out radicals and Communists from the acting and screen-writing professions.

As governor of California in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Reagan unabashedly sided with the state’s giant agribusiness industry against attempts by the United Farm Workers union to organize workers in the fields.

Reagan vetoed a measure granting unemployment insurance to the farm workers after had been passed by the state legislature three times in a row. And he gobbled scab grapes on TV to demonstrate his disdain for the union-initiated grape boycott.

Reagan was uncompromising in his opposition to the social movements of the time that had been given impetus by the mass protests against the war in Vietnam. He sent the National Guard against Berkeley students and neighborhood activists who were demanding that the University of California not demolish the community’s “Peoples Park.” In the battle that ensued, one student was killed by National Guard gunfire.

Reagan initiated his 1980 presidential campaign with an appearance in Philadelphia, Miss., where, in a famous case of lynching, three civil rights workers had been murdered in August 1964. In his speech there, Reagan signaled the reactionary tilt of his administration by speaking out in favor of “states’ rights,” terminology used by Southern Jim Crow politicians to justify their racist policies. By this means, Reagan was able to facilitate the transfer of former “Dixiecrat” racists into the Republican Party. Thereafter, Reagan and his cohorts succeeded in building electoral support by playing on the prejudices of many conservatized workers, whose resentments, during a period of falling living standards, had been stirred up by the meager gains of more oppressed sectors of the population in previous years—such as Blacks, women, gays, and the poor.

Prejudice against these oppressed sectors continued as a hallmark of the Reagan White House. Reagan’s homophobia delayed federal research and other health measures for AIDS for seven years after the virus was discovered, during which time the disease was allowed to spread rapidly through the gay community.

Support to the death squads

Reagan’s illegal support to the Nicaraguan Contra War against the 1979 Sandinista Revolution cost the lives of 80,000 Nicaraguans. After mass U.S. protests had forced Congress to pass the 1984 Boland Amendment to a House appropriations bill, which banned all military aid to the U.S.-armed Contra death squads, Reagan conspired with the CIA and key National Security officers like Lt. Colonel Oliver North to illegally fund his secret army, whom he publicly likened to the “founding fathers of our country.”

The affair became a matter of public record during the infamous “Contragate” congressional hearings, during which time it was revealed that CIA officials had secured millions for the illegal war from Colombian-based drug lords, the Saudi and Israeli governments, and from secretly selling TOW missiles to the Iranian government.

Until that time U.S. policy had armed the Saddam Hussein regime—with everything from helicopters to cluster bombs—in a war against the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which had removed the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran from power. During 1983 and 1984, for example, Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld as his personal emissary to Baghdad to offer military aid and advice to Saddam.

An outcry erupted in Congress and the media, however, when it became known that White House “Contragate” figures had been backing both sides in the Iran/Iraq War despite the vitriol launched against the regime of Ayatollah Khomeni in Iran.

During the early 1980s, as well, U.S. aid swelled to reactionary Islamist forces in Afghanistan—whom Reagan embraced as “freedom fighters” against the USSR. Washington secretly conspired with the dictatorships of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to provide financing and logistics for the Afghan insurgents.

In recent years, of course, the very missile launchers and other weapons that the U.S. furnished to these forces have been used against the United States and its allies—a classic case of what the CIA termed “blow back.”

Reagan’s CIA-trained killers graduating from the infamous School of the Americas oversaw the arming of the death squad armies in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Eighty thousand Salvadorans and 400,000 Guatemalans died at the hands of U.S.-backed regimes. The CIA’s “assassination manuals” became the bible for the mass murder orchestrated to protect U.S. economic interests in Central America.

In 1983 Reagan sent 1200 U.S. troops to Grenada on the pretext that U.S. medical students there were in danger and that the Cuban government had constructed a military airfield. Both claims proved to be fraudulent.

The Teflon President

Reagan and his administration were at the center of a myriad of financial and political scandals. Reagan, however, was known as the “Teflon President” and seemed immune from close public scrutiny. He consistently claimed that he had no knowledge of the crimes committed by his subordinates, including those who operated out of the White House or who were directly responsible to him.

Neither his Democratic Party opponents or any wing of the corporate media dared to point the finger of guilt at a man who did what was necessary, by any means necessary, to defend the common capitalist agenda when it was in danger.

Little has changed since Reagan’s bold opening shots fired across the bow of potential world corporate competitors and his direct shots at the U.S. working class and oppressed people fighting for liberation and freedom around the globe.

Reagan was followed by George Bush Sr., who continued his policies with equal vigor. And then came the “liberal” administration of Bill Clinton, who cut more social services than the combined presidencies of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr. All were expert at reading the prepared scripts of their corporate masters.

Today’s Ronald Reagan, the dullard script-reader George W. Bush, has proclaimed that Reagan’s “legacy will last forever,” no doubt hoping that his own administration will be similarly celebrated upon his demise. A more likely scenario, however, is that subsequent capitalist regimes in the White House will be replaced by a revolution from below based on the rising of the great working-class majority.

Working people will come to learn from their own experience that socialist cooperation, as opposed to capitalist competition, is the way forward for all humanity.

This article first appeared in the July 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.