[Militant International Review, No 19, Spring 1980, p. 19-24]
In the mid-term Congressional elections in November 1978, the last major national elections, two thirds of the registered voters didn’t even bother to take part. That in itself is an indictment of the American political system, a clear expression of the widespread contempt shown to Congress. But the puny and uninspiring character of the Presidency is not only the fault of Jimmy Carter. If mediocrity is now the by-word for the White House it is because. mediocrity has invaded the whole. political machine of the American ruling class.
The “Imperialist Presidents” of the past, the statesmen like Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Johnson, presided over the strongest nation the planet had seen, both in economic and military terms. But at the same time the White House and the Pentagon, by their vast and costly military adventures overseas – especially in Vietnam – were ultimately responsible for the weakening of the American economy and the consequent loss of strategic and military power.
The Watergate hearings and the forced resignation of Nixon were more than a personal indictment against him; they were part of a process by which the strategists of capital used Congress to break the back of the “Emperors” … A whole arsenal of obstructions and regulations were placed by Congress in the way of the Presidency so that Congress would no longer be a rubber stamp for future adventures like those in Vietnam and Cambodia. The legislative arm asserted its authority,.over the executive arm of government.
Moreover, the diffusion of authority downwards from the Presidents to the Congressional committees has also been paralleled by enormous blows to the confidence and morale of the ruling class. The failure of the Vietnam war, the Watergate affair, the 1975 recession, the energy crisis, Iran, etc. etc. – all these have left the once-mighty American ruling class reeling, gasping for a strategy and a policy for the future.
It is ironic that they are now bemoaning the lack of a great leader for the nation. The same political pundits who ridiculed Carter are now trying to build him up as a statesman; Watergate and the Vietnam war must be consigned to the past; the ‘emperors’ are forgiven. History repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce! But try as they might, the American ruling class will not conjure up the statesmen of the past, when they lack confidence in their own system and their own future.
How can they trust another ‘emperor’ when they cannot trust themselves? There is no longer a ‘consensus’ as there was in the 1950s and 1960s about the best course in international and domestic questions. The Presidency is in a crisis because the American ruling class is in a crisis.
After the ‘British Century’ of the 1800s the post war period in America seemed to point to what was referred to as the ‘American Century’. The USA emerged enormously strengthened after the second world war, the only real victor among the capitalist powers. By 1944, with 80 per cent of the capitalists’ world gold in its vaults, the USA was able to impose the Bretton Woods agreement on the rest of the capitalist world. The dollar became the world’s main reserve currency and it was on this basis that America was able to produce massive quantities of currency that was not backed by gold or productive capacity in the USA – so-called ‘fictitious capital’.
In the decades after Bretton Woods the world was flooded with billions of dollars of this fictitious money, enabling the USA to buy up and invest in many industries in Europe and to finance deficits in the balance of payments from around 1950 onwards. Each successive deficit increased the amount of ‘paper’ dollars in circulation. The deficits were boosted enormously by the massive military costs as American Imperialism acted as the policeman for world capitalism.
Even at the height of the post-war boom, the real value of the dollar was dissolving away in the flood of paper money. By the 1960s it became clear that the real value of the dollar notes floating around the world was less than the amount set at Bretton Woods i.e. $35 to the ounce of gold. Greater competition from Japan and Europe created a deficit on trade from 1971 onwards, further swelling the outflow of dollars to the world.
Pressure on the dollar forced the first devaluation in 1971 and it has continued to slide ever since. In 1971 $53.3 billion of dollar currency was held abroad against a holding of $10.5 billion of gold in US vaults. Today the dollar holding abroad amounts to over $250 billion. Little wonder that, once the dam cracked, it broke altogether: once it was freed from the artificial price of $35, the price of an ounce of gold soared. Putting it another way, against gold, the dollar has lost more than 95 per cent of its 1970 value!
The value of the dollar is likely to decline even further against gold and other currencies, given the fact that there seems to be no end in the immediate future to the massive balance of payments deficits, especially in relation to oil.
The fires of inflation at home have been fuelled by the Keynesian policies of successive governments. From 1945 to 1954 there were five years when the government’s own budget was in deficit and five years when it was in surplus. From 1955 to 1964 there were seven years of deficits and three years of surplus. From 1965 to 1974 there were nine deficit years and only one year of surplus. The total deficit run up over the last 20 years was $400 billion and despite efforts to cut it down, this year’s budget deficit alone was over $30 billion. Those years of plenty, when there were unprecedented increases in living standards, were all piling up massive contradictions which are now surfacing with explosive consequences.
The ‘Keynesian chickens’ are coming home to roost for the American capitalist class. Even now, with prices rising at 15-20 per cent a year, the American working class has yet to feel the full lash of the inflation stored up in the past decades. As the sober-minded Times pointed out in an editorial: “We have reason to expect that the purchasing power of the dollar in 1990 will be well below its purchasing power today. We may suspect that it may fall by at least 50 per cent, which would represent compound inflation at just over a seven per cent rate. We may fear that it will now fall by more than 75 per cent, which would be a compound inflation at a 15 per cent rate.”
Post-war boom ended
These factors explain the frantic attempts – although largely unsuccessful – to reduce the external trade deficit, and especially the oil deficit. At the same time, it explains the enormous pressure behind Carter and other representatives of the ruling class to introduce savage ‘monetarist’ policies, to cut public expenditure and to decrease the government’s own budget deficit. All Carter’s pre-election promises of welfare improvements and tax cuts for workers evaporated and came to nothing in the face of the financial constraints of the capitalist system.
The end of the post-war boom signposted particularly by the 1975 recession and the demise of the dollar, has dealt a shattering blow to the morale and confidence of the ruling class. In their blindness, the capitalists were super-optimistic even as recently as the early 1970s. Thus the influential ‘Fortune’ magazine glowed in July 1974: “By comparison with the past 18 months, the next 18 will be almost sunny. … Industrial production will rise at an annual rate of a bit under 4 per cent over the ah coming 18 months … the world doesn’t seem to be moving into a severe recession … unemployment will tend to increase to just below 6 per cent …”’.
Within 5 months the US Treasury Secretary admitted that they were in the worst recession since World War II and the official unemployment rate was moving towards 9 per cent!
Now the rose-tinted forecasts of the halcyon days have been replaced by forecasts of doom and gloom. The blows that have affected the economy have debilitated the wider political thinking of the strategists of American capitalism. There is no longer any clear strategy or perspective in domestic or foreign policy issues. An article in the ‘Washington Post’ last year summed up the mood of the ruling class. It was entitled: “The intellectuals agree, there are no answers any more.” It goes on: “Prominent thinkers agree on only one point: there is little or no agreement on issues of major consequence. The consensus that marked the first 25 post World War II years has been shattered. At home there has been a mainstream academic view, a belief that Keynesian economic policies could repeat indefinitely the hat-tricks of more or less steady growth in goods and services, high employment and generally stable prices. An intractable and worsening inflation has fractured this … the thinkers are in similar difficulties on foreign policy.”
The Professor of Urban Values of New York University was reported as resigning, saying, ‘I don’t have anything to say any more. I don’t think anybody does. When a problem becomes too difficult, you lose interest.” Another luminary from Harvard commenting on domestic policies said, ‘Nobody has any answers he is confident of. If he does, he’s a fool.”
The paralysis of the intelligentsia is an indication of the profound crisis that faces American society: in its widest economic and social sense, the USA faces tremendous upheavals and changes in the 1980s. The great days of the ‘50s and ‘60s are over. These changes will bring unparalleled movement in the conditions and the consciousness of the mass of American workers. Unlike the worthy professor, the worker cannot simply choose to ‘lose interest’.
What is the position that faces the working class? How will the American trade unions respond to the crisis in the coming months and years? For a generation after the war a layer of American workers enjoyed unexampled prosperity, far greater than that achieved even by the middle classes in Europe.
There seemed to be an endless supply of televisions, motor cars, and all the other tokens of affluence, as well as an endless supply of dollars to buy them. American goods, American films and American values seemed to be the last word in modernity. These years saw the further bureaucratisation of the trade unions, especially the CIO which before the war had conducted militant campaigns, recruiting workers on an industrial basis by the millions.
The CIO merged with the craft-conscious AFL and the new AFL-CIO became a bastion of ‘anti-communism’, supporting all the reactionary policies of the governments. On the political plane, the workers felt no compulsion to create their own party of labour and the system of the two capitalist parties – the Democrats being slightly more ‘liberal’ than the Republicans – was shored up. The cold war and the example of totalitarianism in Russia, China and Eastern Europe served to further reinforce the backwardness of wide strata of the American workers.
But the last decade has marked the end of the “Golden Age“. Average annual growth in productivity in industry from 1964 to 1973 was 1.8 per cent, but by the mid ‘70s, 1974-78, it had fallen to 0.1 per cent. The recession of 1975 saw levels of unemployment at post-war record levels – adding the hidden unemployed to the official figure would have shown well over 10 million jobless. In that year actual production fell by only half a percentage point but it was enough to signal the end of the boom.
The ‘recovery’ from the 1975 recession showed, on paper, production increases of 6 to 8 per cent a year, but this ‘mini-boom’ was in no way based upon investment in new capital, but on government financing, adding further fuel to the fires of inflation. The levels of employment and the levels of investment have only marginally recovered from the 1975 period and now, even as inflation is on the increase, the country faces a new recession in 1980, even worse than the last. The era of ‘stagflation’ has arrived.
9 million poor
It has been the working class that has borne the brunt of the economic crisis over the last decade. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that, “Since 1972 the real income of a typical US family of four has declined by 8 per cent, although its dollar income has increased by 66 per cent.” (15th Nov. 1979) It also pointed out that these figures do not take into account the increases in state and city taxation, so that the real decline in living standards will be considerably more.
The inflation rate at the moment is given as 13 per cent but in reality it is much higher. The official Consumer Price Index does not take into account the fact that poorer families spend a far greater share of their income on the faster rising items like food, housing, energy, and so on. Even by the government’s own modest standards for ‘minimum requirements’, poverty now engulfs more than five million families. It has been estimated that one third of all the tinned dog and cat food bought in the shops is in fact used for human consumption because of the prohibitive cost of meat.
More than seven million workers are unemployed in America today. But this figure also hides the extent to which the unemployment affects large numbers of families. It was admitted, for example that while the average level for unemployment in 1973 was 4.9 per cent, the total proportion of the workforce who had experienced unemployment for one or more spells in that year was 14.2 per cent! All the major US cities are now staggering under the weight of accumulated debt interest and so their social and welfare services are being pared to the bone.
The bald statistics of homelessness, unemployment and poverty disguise the intensity of these problems in certain areas. Whole areas of inner cities now consist of acres and acres of derelict or semi-derelict sums. Unemployment in the inner cities and among black youth is staggering.
Neither are the American workers cushioned to any great extent by social welfare. Only about half of the unemployed receive any state benefits and that does not take into account the many hidden unemployed and underemployed. When it comes to health charges, the American workers can be seen to be completely vulnerable to the sharks and the parasites of the private system.
In 1976 when living standards were a little higher than today, nearly 45 million Americans were without even basic hospitalisation insurance and when it came to major medical expenses, 80 million were not insured. It costs the average family, even with insurance cover, about $2,800 for the delivery of a healthy child. In the last few years the government has been forced into introducing government health schemes, but these are a farce as far as most workers are concerned.
The government Health, Education and Welfare Department sets a ‘poverty line’ for a family with two children at an income of $9,600 a year but in some states such a family would have to earn less than $4,800 a year to qualify for free health care under ‘Medicare’! Thus, 9 million living below the official poverty line are not eligible! For the overwhelming majority of Americans, any serious illness or accident means a certain drop in living standards or even bankruptcy.
Quite clearly, the position of American workers today is far removed from the apparent harmony and security of former years. On the basis of capitalism they face only further savage attacks upon their living standards as the economic problems are foisted onto their backs. The promises of a dynamic and thrusting capitalism have vanished. As one Congressman admitted, “The US is a rickety-rackety ramshackle economy. America’s health, food, steel, car, electronics and energy industries are all in trouble and tighter money policies are not going to help.”
The problems facing the motor industry are in many respects typical of those facing the whole of American industry. One job in every six in manufacturing depends on the motor industry, particularly those in steel, glass, rubber, and so on. At the present time all of the main car manufacturers are facing serious problems, as a result of higher petrol costs and foreign competition. Last year the ‘Big 3’ car companies (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) laid off about 46,000 workers: and this year will certainly be worse. The car manufacturers are planning one of the lowest first quarter production schedules for years – 23 per cent down on the same time last year (30 per cent down for the ‘Big 3’, and 50 per cent for Ford alone) but even these production figures are still well above the anticipated sales levels. The ruling class are in a vicious circle because as they cut into living standards in an attempt to shore up profits, they also decrease the market by reducing the purchasing power of the workers.
Even these reduced production schedules will probably turn out to be over-optimistic as the months wear on. The problems faced by the Chrysler Corporation which has been forced to go to the government for a $1,500 million handout are only the beginning of problems for that particular company and for the motor industry as a whole. The steel industry is also facing a recession and the US Steel Corporation, for example, has recently decided to close down 10 entire plants and parts of others, with the loss of 13,000 jobs. The company has further threatened to close other plants unless the workers accept a 3-year wages freeze. Under these conditions the American workers will inevitably move in the direction of militant action and socialist ideas.
In the past in times of economic crisis there was always at least the hope of a new life in the West and mid-West. This safety valve is now missing; the workers have nowhere else to go.
The first to feel the icy winds of the post war slow-down were the black workers. The 24 million blacks and the 20 million Spanish Americans have long been on the bottom rungs of the social ladder. At no time in the last 20 years has unemployment among blacks and Spanish-speaking Americans been below 6 per cent. Today, in the inner city areas unemployment among the youth of these minority groups hovers at or above the 50 per cent mark.
The opposition of black workers in particular threw up various militant organisations like the ‘Black Panthers’ in the late 1960s, but these organisations were always condemned to obscurity as long as they failed to find any way to the organised working class. Today, however, black workers are moving into action in their hundreds of thousands, but now as trade unionists along with their white and Chicano brothers and sisters. Just as the years of prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s caused a decline in union membership and activity, so the shocks and turbulence of the 1970s have thrown: the American trade unions once again onto the industrial battlefield.
Miners Strike
In the last few years almost every section of workers has been involved in struggle: steelworkers, rubber workers, lorry drivers, local authority workers and so on. But perhaps the most significant of the strikes of the period was the miners’ strike that ran for more than three months from December 1977.
The strike showed the tremendous pressure of the rank and file miners on the leadership and the ingenuity and determination of the miners on strike. Flying pickets were organised and managed to close down all of the union mines and half of the non-union mines – 75 per cent of all total production.
The President of the Miners, Arnold Miller, who had been elected himself on a reformist programme, struck a deal with the coal owners after the strike had started but he was inundated with telegrams and delegations demanding ‘No Sell Out!” In the middle of the strike the miners voted two to one against the offer.
Even the pressure of the government failed to force the miners back to work. You would think that having invoked the Taft-Hartley Act three times in the past against the miners and having been ignored three times, that the White House wouldn’t have bothered this time. But bother they did and the miners duly ignored the order to go back to work.
To be more exact, the miners didn’t ignore the order, they scoffed at it! Despite a vicious campaign by the press and the coal owners trying to break the solidarity of the strike, other workers and trade unionists rallied round, seeing the miners’ strike, quite correctly, as a test case for all the trade unions.
As soon as the Taft-Hartley Act was invoked, in fact, other trade unions threatened a 24 hour strike in protest. The International Longshore Workers (dockers) levied their membership to support the miners. Trucks and truck convoys from all over the North and Mid-West took food and essential supplies to the miners in their isolated communities.
After 110 days the strike was settled for wage rises of 40 per cent over three years, but with the miners’ leaders having compromised on some very important issues like health and insurance benefits. Many miners were angry at the settlement, feeling that their leaders gave away at the negotiating table what the miners had won on the picket line. Despite the hardship endured by the miners and their families (the average miner having lost $6,000) the vote to accept the third offer was only 57 per cent. In disgust many UMW members have since left the union, drifting away to non-union mines where safety is poorer but wages may be higher.
The UMW membership was claimed at 280,000 in May of 1978, but the rolls only showed 160,000 last December. Today, the total share of coal produced in organised mines is only 52 per cent compared with 82 per cent in 1951. Nevertheless, the experiences and lessons of the strike will not be lost on the miners that took part, not to mention the millions of other trade unionists who supported them. Whatever the effect of the final settlement, however much the miners themselves were disappointed with the end result, it was clear that the ruling class were deeply shocked at the show of trade union power not seen since the 1930s.
The glaring impotency of the Taft-Hartley Act to send the miners back to work (like the ill-fated Industrial Relations Act in Britain in 1971-72) and even the level of the settlement were seen as twin defeats by the representatives of American capitalism. Robert Strauss, the government’s ‘inflation adviser’ at the time, blurted out, “That agreement cannot be followed in other industries. Is that clear? It would be an outrage for that contract to be taken as a pattern!”
The impact of the strike was to give backbone to the trade union movement. Arnold Miller seemed like a militant compared to Presidents before him who had connections with gangsterism, but even he came under pressure during and after the strike. The repercussions are still being felt in the union two years later. At the recent conference of the UMW, the first since the strike, many rank and file delegates slammed the union bureaucracy for wasting union funds and for not organising mass recruitment drives in the non-union mines.
The delegate from Bluefield, West Virginia was reported to argue that the union leaders “drink up union dues”, and he objected to “high-priced officers in air-conditioned offices“, Another delegate declared that the expenses of the union’s international leadership „are double what they ought to be’. Delegates also demanded unionisation drives: a delegate from Marissa, Illinois was reported to say that “thousands of tons of scab coal is being imported from the West to the East“ and a delegate from Wyoming complained that “90 per cent of the coal in that state is scab.”
For the miners and the coal owners, 1978 was only round one. The contract drawn up and agreed then runs out in early 1981 and the coal operators at least are already preparing for battle. Even if the UMW are numerically weaker now than they were three years ago, the experiences of that strike will be an invaluable asset. The memory of 1978: the solidarity, the flying pickets, the role of the National Guard and the police etc. – all these are imbued in the minds of those who took part, including those who may have temporarily left the ranks of the union. The militancy and the strength of the miners will be renewed in the next few years along with renewed demands for rank and file control over the union leadership.
There have been significant reform movements in other unions too in the last few years. In 1975 and 1976 the leadership of the United Steelworkers of America was rocked by a campaign for rank and file representation led by Ed Sadlowski. That movement failed to assert itself at a national level but remains an important force, in so far as it affected at least many state leaderships, especially in Cleveland, but there cannot be any doubt that the fights that loom against redundancies and wages freeze will throw up other movements to bring that union back into the hands of its own membership.
Similarly, there have been moves to democratise the Teamsters Union, associated in the past with organised crime, by reformist groups like “Teamsters for Union Democracy”. There are many examples in Britain of trade unions that have come under similar pressure from the rank and file during the last decade. Some of the most militant unions at the moment were little more than company unions only a decade or so ago. In the same way the mass membership of the American trade unions will move to transform the leadership and the constitution of their own trade unions, as a result of the class struggles now opening up.
In contrast to what has happened in most of the other capitalist countries, the proportion of American workers in trade unions has declined since the war, from 36 per cent to below 25 per cent. In the “Sunbelt” of the Southern states, state governments have passed so-called “right to work” laws banning closed shops. Many of the big corporations have set up factories in these states (the worst three, for example, have between 8 and 11 per cent organisation) at the expense of the more organised Northern states. But this numerical weakness on the part of the trade unions will not be more than a temporary handicap in the future. When the American workers were recovering from the depression, the newly-formed Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) organised massive recruitment drives that brought millions of fresh workers into the trade union for the first time.
Between 1933 and 1937 the numbers of trade union members rose from less than 3 million to over 7 million, chiefly as a result of CIO activity. The looming economic crisis in the US today will find a class still strong and confident, despite the low levels of organisation, and once again the union activity and membership drives will bring in millions of fresh workers. It is significant that where union membership is already going ahead it is among white collar workers – like their counterparts in Britain, they are realising that their positions are no longer ‘privileged’ and that they must throw in their lot with the rest of the trade union movement if they are to fight back.
The spectacular and explosive character of American capitalism, with all its aggressive and abrasive qualities, has bestowed itself to the American workers in the form of trade union traditions. The mass strike movements of the past, the campaigns of the ‘Wobblies’ (International Workers of the World) and the CIO were nothing if not explosive. These are the traditions that will reassert themselves again in the next decade.
Nor will it be possible for these titanic events to occur without them exerting a profound influence on the political outlook of the working class. The American labour movement has also a rich political tradition, including on. many occasions attempts to set up political parties to represent workers.
Debs, for example, as the Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency in 1912 got one million votes. But for two generations it has seemed that this part of history has been buried beneath mountains of accumulated ideological rubbish from the years of relative affluence and stability. The prejudices and political habits of the Cold War period and the post-war boom are like weights bearing down on the minds of many workers, but they are not immovable weights.
The class struggles cannot but increase in temperature in the future and this will raise fresh political ideas and aspirations in the minds of millions of workers, especially among the youth. The ‘Vietnam” generation will be in the forefront of the class struggle.
It is a remarkable fact that despite the “anti-communist” theme of all the official news and government propaganda (including the trade union leaders) the workers are so intensely distrustful of big business that, according to a New York Times opinion poll, 23 per cent of the population are in favour of the nationalisation of the oil companies! Among workers with incomes below $10,000 the figure was 31 per cent and among blacks as high as 42 per cent. And this is without any mass campaign of propaganda and education by the trade unions or a Labour Party!
A Labour Party
At the moment. these political aspirations have no real outlet but already there are at least tentative moves towards the establishment of a Labour Party based upon the trade unions. For the last few years the Democrats – supposedly the more liberal of the two pro-capitalist parties – have controlled all the levers of power, that is the Presidency, both Houses of Congress as well as numerous state governments. Carter abandoned all the promises of reforms and social welfare that swept him to office and along with them he abandoned the hopes of millions of poor, blacks and trade unionists.
These years have shattered the illusions that many workers had in the Democratic Party as a pro-worker party. At the present time it is only the most “left’” wing of the Democrats who retain any credibility among workers, that is, the wing around Senator Edward Kennedy. In Detroit at the end of 1978 a conference took place with representatives from 30 trade unions and over 70 assorted reformist and community organisations.
Marxist ideas
Many of those present, including the leader of the car-workers’ union, Douglas Fraser, were openly talking about the formation of a Labour Party. In the end, the meeting formed the ‘Progressive Alliance’ which seems to have become only a pressure group inside the Democratic Party – certainly Fraser has for the moment abandoned all thoughts of a Labour Party and has come out with an endorsement of Kennedy’s election campaign. But the Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party will not hold on forever to the support it now has. If he reaches the White House, Kennedy will come under the same pressures as did Carter four years before him. Kennedy the liberal will be utterly incapable and unwilling to tackle the vested interests of big business and he will be forced to press the burden of the country’s economic problems onto the working class. The establishment of a ‘party for the representation of Labour’, based on the trade unions, will only be a matter of time under these conditions.
A Labour Party would act as a mighty pole of attraction to blacks, Spanish-Americans and young workers especially. For years there has been a shift in membership and activity from the two main parties to activity in so-called single issue groups, based on stopping pollution, nuclear energy, civil rights, and so on, This is a further indication of the decline in support for the traditional parties. A Labour Party would become a focus for all those isolated reformist groups, but it would be above all else the political arm of the trade union movement, generalising upon the struggles and needs of workers in many cities, industries and cultural backgrounds
The goals and aspirations of the workers, stifled or only half-expressed in the past will be brought to the fore in the party programme. Demands for a National Health Service will find a wide echo, as well as urgent reforms in housing, job creation, trade union rights, and so on. Whilst it will have taken the British Labour Party over 80 years to arrive at the programme of changing society, there is no reason on earth to suppose that an American Labour party will take anything like as long.
On the contrary, the explosive character of the coming social events will push a Labour Party rapidly to the left in the USA. Workers will base their political ideas on concrete reality, not on abstractions and there cannot be any lasting reforms on the basis of capitalism. The American workers will quickly begin to demand fundamental and revolutionary changes in society.
Marxist ideas will quickly grow in the trade unions and in a Labour Party in the future. With its basis in trade union branches and Labour Councils (Trades Councils) as well as in the Labour Party itself, a Marxist tendency would soon gain the ear of the advanced workers moving into the political arena, and through them would influence the wider labour movement.
From trade union branches to city-wide influence anc from the city to the state and national level, the ideas of Marxism will find an echo. The programme of Marxism is based upon the real needs of the workers themselves:
* National Minimum Wage of $1,500 a month.
* No redundancies. Share out the work on full pay. Reduce the working week to 35 and then to 32 hours.
Adequate living wage for those unemployed.
* For a decent living wage for all retired workers.
* For a public health service free at the point of use.
* For the cancellation of all city and state interest charges.
* For a crash programme of municipal housing.
* Interest-free loans and cheap credits to small farmers.
* Public ownership of big business, finance and the establishment of a democratic plan of production.
* For workers’ control and management of industry.
By the end of the century the physiognomy of the whole world will have changed, if anything at all can be judged from economic, social and political trends. Tens and hundreds of millions of workers will be catapulted onto the political stage for the first time. On a world scale, the 1980s will be an epoch of social instability and revolution. The United States of America will be no exception. Social upheaval and revolutions devour old political parties and create new ones, sometimes several times over and the American landscape of today will not be able to withstand the political earthquakes of the future.
The capitalist class will reduce and even ultimately destroy its own productive capacity rather than lose forever its power and position. In the long run, the American ruling class would even resort to totalitarianism in order to stop the onward march of the trade unions, and that would mean disaster for the whole of mankind. An American military police dictatorship in the 1990s would spell nuclear holocaust. But before such a bloody reaction ever became possible, the workers would have many opportunities to show their revolutionary mettle.
A. socialist United States of America would be a beacon to the whole of humanity. Inheriting from capitalism the most up to date scientific and technological skills would put a workers’ government in a position to conquer all the ills of mankind, not only in America, but internationally. The American ruling class is incapable of developing science and technique any further. The American workers will show them the way.
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