Social clashes are on the horizon given the crisis facing US capitalism and the choices that the ruling class are being forced to make because of it. The elections, as we pointed out on this blog were not a massive shift to the right as some are saying. Fewer than a fifth of Americans saw the elections as giving a mandate to the Republican Party, according to most sources. In one poll, when asked whether the election provided a mandate for Republicans or was a rejection of Democrats, 70 percent said the midterms were a negative reaction to the party in government. Only 17 percent said the election provided the GOP with a mandate. This would be of registered voters.
The youth voter turnout this month, that’s 18 to 29 year olds, declined from 23.5% in 2006 to 20.9% as young people expressed their discontent with Obama’s right wing policies. Nationwide, in 2008, about 51 percent of young people voted, mostly for Obama.
The US ranks about 139th globally in voter participation so we have to recognize we are talking about a certain section of the population here, and many of those that vote do so holding their noses. It is common in the US for people to admit they are voting for the “lesser of two evils”. This is a mantra here.
The Wall Street Journal has a long piece on the crisis today and what has to be done about it. It points to the measures the states are taking to address the problem and give Indiana as one example. Indiana’s governor, Bush’s old buddy Mitch Daniels, has been savaging worker’s living standards. He started by issuing an executive order to end collective bargaining rights for public state employees. He ordered state agencies to reduce spending by 15% in total. He cut $150 million in aid to colleges and universities, suspended the state’s matching contribution to the public employee retirement system, and even ended a grocery subsidy the state provided to developmentally disabled people because the program was “misused”. Daniels tried unsuccessfully to impose a 10% cut in aid to foster parents and two weeks ago proposed cutting benefits to the unemployed. Indiana’s unemployment is 10.1%, and we know that will be a conservative estimate.
Yet the Journal reports that Daniels “remains popular” being elected with a large margin and having a 65% approval rating. For a moment I was stunned. How can this be? Workers are not damned stupid. We don’t support people who are so blatantly against our interests. Daniels is an economic terrorist. He is terrorizing, as they all are, the workers of this country, in particular the most vulnerable of us in order to protect the interests of the super rich. To put it quite bluntly, he’s a nasty bastard. But you know he is hated, and his 65% approval rating is 65% of what? 65% of the percentage of the 35% or so that bothered to vote in Indiana? (1)
So we should be sure to look closely at these results and the conclusions the mouthpieces of the corporations draw from them. I read that in Ohio, only 22.3 percent of voters cast ballots.
The history of the US working class is a rich one; we should all be proud of it. It is a violent one, not unlike all countries but particularly so here where we have never had a mass political party of our own so our advances have been made through industrial struggles and battles in the streets. Then there is the struggle against slavery and our racist past. In my lifetime, they were hanging and castrating black people and getting away with it. And from the onset, the US capitalist class was crass, brutal. Somewhat different to the British capitalist class, that were forced by circumstances to defend their ideas and wage a few hundred year ideological struggle against the feudal aristocracy. For US capitalism in its beginnings it was simply a case of wiping out a few million of the native population and building an infrastructure. There's was no organized class it had to displace.
We are headed for major clashes again as the US capitalist class is forced to drive workers back to the conditions that prevailed before the sit-downs, general strikes and rise of the CIO in the 1930’s and the civil rights movement in the 50’s and 60’s.
In the November issue of Foreign Affairs, Roger Altman and Richard Haass, former deputy US Treasury Secretary and President of the Council on Foreign Relations respectively, warn their class colleagues of the dangers ahead if steps aren’t taken to change the course of the US economy and adapt to a new world situation in which the US is no longer the sole dominant power. (2) The US bourgeois is obsessed with this reality, the decline of their influence on the world stage.
They point to the chronic indebtedness of US society. The US budget went from a surplus of 1% of GDP in 1998 to a 3.2% deficit in 2008 they point out. Haass warn their class that, “The post 2020 fiscal outlook is downright apocalyptic.” if something is not done, not exactly an optimistic scenario from their point of view; more an economic jihad. If Altman and Haass were al Qaeda operatives they’d be strapping explosives to themselves to ensure their entrance through the pearly gates.
Altman’s article is a long one and has some very useful statistics in it. But in the last analysis, it draws the conclusion that those of us that are active politically in one way or another or who read the more serious journals of capitalism regularly, already know; they are going to force workers to pay for their crisis with a combination of tax increases and cuts in social spending. This is already underway of course.
The capitalist class is very clear about its intentions. Altman uses the term US austerity numerous times. He is concerned that the bi-partisan squabbling-----the division between thieves----will hinder the task before them, the shifting of the crisis of the system on to the backs of workers and the middle class. “If US leaders do not act to curb this debt addiction, then the global capital markets will do so for them, forcing a sharp and punitive adjustment in fiscal policy.” he warns. “The result will be an age of American austerity.”
He doesn’t have much faith in the ability of the politicians of the two capitalist parties to get this done voluntarily as the “magnitude” of the tax increases and the cuts in spending is so great. “The more likely path is a solution imposed on the United States by global markets.” He adds.
Surveys from the AFL-CIO to the Wall Street Journal confirm that the election did not reveal a major rightward shift but anger at the governing party. They confirm that the right wing shock and awe candidates that were successful in the mid-terms will find that the voters overwhelmingly oppose increasing taxes and cutting social spending; in other words, they conflict with what both Democrats and Republicans know has to be done to solve America’s economic malady. An exception is the pension issue with public sector workers as our pensions, wages and benefits are being blamed for the crisis and this is finding an echo among many workers whose conditions are being driven to third world levels and because the Union leadership at the highest level offer no counter whatsoever to this propaganda, and in fact agree with it, differing only on the severity of the attacks.
The US population is not favorable to the wars that the US is fighting. The burden for these adventures is falling on a relatively small percentage of the population, which is one reason public opposition has not been more prominent. The US spends more on what it mistakenly calls defense than China, Russia, Japan, India and the rest of NATO combined.
There is enough money and wealth in society to invest in massive infrastructure and social spending. There is enough money in society to provide everyone with decent health care, housing, education and other social necessities. We need not have PhD’s in economics to figure out that if we are borrowing a billion dollars a day, someone has a billion dollars to lend us.
The civil rights movement is more recent example of how to fight and what we can accomplish. Because of the legacy of racism in the US, so many white workers know next to nothing about this movement that was an inspiration to workers around the world from the struggle of the Catholics in Ireland to the struggle for independence of the European colonies in Africa and Asia. It is important for white workers to read books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or the writings of Richard Wright. We should read these not because of guilt which is a motivating factor for so many liberal, but because it is the history of one of the most victimised sections of our class. The same with the history of women workers and womens' oppression.
But as I always used to tell my co-workers at work who would say that we can’t change things; we have an ally in this regard---the boss. They will not stop and they are forced, by the crisis of the system to intensify their assault. They will drive us on to the offensive. Given the stifling bureaucratic hold the top Labor officials with their army of full-time staff has on the traditional Labor movement, it is quite possible and even likely that a major movement will develop outside these traditional bodies, but there is no denying that the organized working class will be convulsed by and drawn in to such a movement.
The decline of the industrial working class in the US and the change in the composition of the working class in general will undoubtedly affect the nature of our offensive; no one can predict exactly how things will develop, but fourteen million workers organized in such major sectors of the economy as shipping, air transport, retail and others, will play a major role in the battles ahead.
Altman, while giving many examples of where the cuts can be made, also states more than once that the moneylender’s interest on debt is the only item that cannot be cut and must be paid. This is a massive amount and increasing. “The American people and their elected representatives postpone solving the country’s debt addiction at their great peril,“ he concludes.
The problem they have is that our class-consciousness is enough to allow us to know that we are getting screwed buy these people. We don’t accept that there’s no money; we know they have it. They cannot openly come out and say to us that we have to return to pre-nineteen thirties conditions. The US political instruments are broken. One of their two parties can’t be so blunt for fear that the other party would clean up on the one hand and the fear of the working class on the other.
The island of Hong Kong was signed over to British capitalism for “all time”. The coming battles will prove Altman and Haass wrong on a few things, the payment of interest but one of them. They’re in a bit of a predicament all right.
(1) Indiana’s official voter turn out was not released as of today. But one analyst described it as not “overwhelming,"
(2) American Profligacy and American Power: Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2010
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