The working class and the US elections
By the Editorial Board
World Socialist Workers Web Site
2 November 1998
As the midterm election campaigns of the Democrats and Republicans
enter their final hours, one fact stands out: neither party is able to address
the crucial social questions that face the broad masses of the American
people.
The secret behind the debased character of the campaign, in which
soundbites and personal attacks substitute for a serious discussion of
issues, is the fact that the two parties share a similar right-wing agenda.
Neither has anything to say when it comes to the decline in decent-paying
jobs and the fall in workers' living standards, or the crisis in housing, health
care and education.
The two parties have a tacit agreement to suspend discussion on a whole
series of questions until after the elections, including possible military
intervention in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans and other international flash
points, plans to privatize Social Security and impose new cuts in Medicare,
and various schemes to further reduce taxes for the rich. Whatever the
outcome of the vote, workers are in for sharp and painful surprises.
None of the politicians, Democratic or Republican, dares mention the
world financial crisis that began last year in southeast Asia and is now
hitting the centers of world capitalism in Western Europe and the United
States. The November 3 vote is taking place in the shadow of this
gathering economic storm and the slide into recession in the US. The
Federal Reserve Board cut interest rates twice over the past month in an
effort to prop up the financial markets until after the election.
The past few weeks alone have seen sweeping layoff announcements in
virtually every sector of the economy: finance and brokerage (Merrill
Lynch), defense (Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney), computers (Packard Bell,
Applied Materials, Rockwell International), consumer products (Gillette,
Toys 'R Us), retail (Dillards, Spartan Stores), farm equipment (Case,
AGCO), auto parts (Dana, Tenneco), metals (Phelps Dodge, Weirton
Steel), paper (International Paper), oil (Atlantic Richfield), to name just a
few.
The lurch toward recession in the weeks and months after the election will
have devastating implications for working people, who have barely been
able to make ends meet during the long boom in Wall Street share values
and corporate profits. Many will join the tens of millions already living near
or below the poverty line. The impact of the bipartisan assault on welfare
and other social programs will hit with even greater force under conditions
of economic slump.
Social polarization
None of these issues can be broached because they all point to the most
politically explosive question in America: the enormous growth of social
inequality.
Economic disparities have widened even more rapidly under Bill Clinton
and the Democrats than under the Republicans Reagan and Bush. From
1992 to 1997, the proportion of national income going to the top 20
percent increased from 46.9 percent to 49.4 percent, while every other
income group saw its share decline. The poorest 20 percent received only
3.6 percent of national income, down from 3.8 percent when Clinton took
office.
A few additional statistics provide an indication of the fantastic
concentration of wealth at the very top of American society:
Between 1994 and 1996, the average income of the top 20 percent of
families with children was $117,499--12.7 times the income ($9,254) of
the bottom 20 percent of families with children.
In Washington, DC--home to the political elite--the gap is even more
pronounced. The income of the top 20 percent of families with children
was $149,508, twenty-eight times that of the bottom 20 percent ($5,293).
The combined assets of the wealthiest three Americans (Bill Gates, Warren
Buffett and John Walton) stand at $94 billion. This is more than the
combined assets of the bottom 50 million. Not counting personal
residences, the financial assets of the three richest Americans is greater
than the combined financial assets of the poorest 100 million.
The immense increase in the wealth of the most privileged layers in the US
has come largely at the expense of the working masses. Definite policies
have been implemented by Democrats and Republicans alike to sustain a
climate of business "confidence" and foster the unprecedented rise in share
values on the stock market.
Corporate downsizing, unionbusting, wage-cutting, the proliferation of
part-time and temporary labor have served to increase economic insecurity
and deter workers from pressing for improvements in pay and benefits.
Health-and-safety, anti-pollution and anti-trust enforcement have been
drastically weakened. Social welfare programs have been gutted, forcing
millions of poor people to accept jobs at poverty-level wages.
The tax burden has been increasingly shifted from corporations and
wealthy individuals to working people. In 1979, for example, the tax rate
for Americans with incomes of more than $1 million was 47 percent. By
1994, the tax rate for this group had declined to 32 percent. In the 1950s,
corporations paid 39 percent of US income taxes. By the end of the 80s
corporations paid only 17 percent of the total US tax bill.
The majority of working class families have seen their living standards fall
steadily for two decades, and this downward trend has continued under
the Clinton administration. Economic insecurity dominates everyday life.
More workers have experienced layoffs and downsizing during the
booming 1990s than during previous recessions. Between 1991 and 1995,
nearly 2.5 million Americans lost their jobs because of corporate
restructuring.
Working class families are increasingly compelled to work more jobs and
longer hours just to make ends meet. This year the average family worked
an additional 240 hours more than in 1989--a full six weeks of additional
labor--with no increase in income.
The low unemployment rate in the United States signifies not prosperity for
the working class, but the prevalence of low-wage exploitation, especially
of the younger generation. It is already a truism to say that the young
workers of today are the first generation in American history to live worse
than their parents. Millions of young people face deteriorating schools,
low-paying jobs with few benefits, and a lifetime of economic insecurity.
Some 43 million Americans have no medical insurance--more than when
Bill Clinton took office promising measures to alleviate the health care
crisis. Six million women and children have been cut from the welfare rolls
over the past three years, not through any alleviation of poverty, which
remains virtually unchanged, but through the elimination of the federal
AFDC program.
For the vast majority of working people, the five years of financial boom
have brought no lasting benefits, only greater debts. The personal savings
rate fell to 2.1 percent in 1997, a 63-year-low, the worst showing for
American families since 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression. Even
before the onset of recession, more than a million American families filed
for bankruptcy, the largest number in American history, and a record
number of small businesses closed their doors.
Assault on democartic rights
Neither party will address this social crisis. Nor will they discuss the
growing threat to democratic rights.
The political issue that has dominated the country for the past nine
months--the investigation of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and the
Republican impeachment drive--has been virtually removed from the
agenda of the 1998 election. Little more than a month ago, Republican
congressional leaders released Starr's report and the videotape of Clinton's
grand jury testimony, declaring that it was essential for the public to be
informed of every detail of the president's sexual conduct. But now, when
the public would presumably have the opportunity to register its response,
both parties insist that the November 3 vote is not a referendum on
impeachment.
The Republicans want to keep the impeachment drive in the background
because they know it is deeply unpopular and could cost them the election.
The Democrats want to downplay the matter because they fear that any
broad appeal to public sentiment against impeachment, which is particularly
strong among workers, could raise social issues for which they have no
answers. Both sense that the suspicion and anger against Starr and the
Republican Congress could become the starting point for the intervention
of wider layers of working people into the political crisis, a prospect which
the entire political establishment abhors.
The Starr investigation has been the spearhead of an escalating assault on
civil liberties. Behind the independent counsel are extreme right-wing
forces with direct links to the top leadership of the Republican Party, the
media and the judiciary. Starr has run roughshod over legal principles such
as lawyer-client privilege and argued that the exercise of First Amendment
rights of free speech is a criminal activity when directed against a
government prosecutor. Behind his inquiry is an attempt to carry though
far-reaching changes in government institutions, in the direction of more
authoritarian forms of rule.
The Republicans have worked in tandem with Starr, while Clinton and the
Democrats have sought to temporize and accommodate their attackers.
They prefer to conceal from the American people the extent of the assault
on democratic rights rather than expose its social and political roots,
because to do so would require laying bare the profoundly corrupt and
anti-democratic character of the entire political system.
Crisis of the two-party system
The 1998 elections bring into sharp relief a protracted process of political
decay. The two-party system has grown increasingly alienated from the
concerns and interests of the great majority of the people, and the forms of
bourgeois politics have become increasingly devoid of genuine democratic
content. The more pervasive the role of corporate money in buying
elections, the more hollow and reactionary the political content of the
campaigns, the greater the chasm separating the working class from the
two big business parties.
For a quarter century the policies of American big business have moved
ever further to the right, and both parties have adapted themselves
accordingly. The Republicans have become the vehicle for extreme
right-wing forces--Christian fundamentalists, militia groups, and market
libertarians who demand the dismantling of all social programs, taxes on
wealth and regulations on business. The more the corporate establishment
has pursued social policies that are deeply unpopular, the more it has
cultivated such ultra-right elements.
Over the past two decades the Democratic Party has embraced the
right-wing policies demanded by big business and abandoned any program
of reforms or concessions to the working class. In the present election, it is
running as the party of fiscal austerity and boasting of presiding over the
most lucrative bull market in Wall Street history.
On basic policy questions, there are virtually no significant differences
between the two parties. This was underscored by a column which
appeared October 30 in the New York Times jointly authored by former
Republican Senator Warren Rudman and former Democratic Senator Sam
Nunn. The column attacked the budget passed earlier this month, which
included a token increase in spending for education, as a breach of budget
discipline.
The proliferation of opinion polls, focus groups, attack ads and "wedge"
issues is symptomatic of the inability of either party to make an appeal to
the masses of people. Another column in the Times summed up the
anti-democratic outlook of both parties. Written by senior executives of a
Republican polling company, it was a defense of the last minute decision to
air Republican TV commercials in selected markets making reference to
the Lewinsky scandal. Entitled "You Don't Need Every Vote," the column
declared: "In the heat of political campaigns, even the experts often forget a
simple rule: you don't have to appeal to everyone to win. It's a waste of
resources. What you need to do it secure your base--make sure core
supporters turn out to vote--and appeal to swing voters..."
Both parties are committed to the policies that have fostered the growth of
social inequality, and these policies have led to an erosion in their base of
popular support. The alienation of the majority of Americans from the
two-party system is demonstrated in the continuing decline in voter turnout,
down to a record low of 17.4 percent in the 1998 primaries.
The masses of working people are politically disenfranchised. Their needs
can find no expression in a system dominated by two parties that work
within the parameters of the capitalist market and the profit system.
The gulf between the political elite and the masses has been underscored
by one of the most significant political events of 1998: the stubborn public
opposition to the Starr investigation. This demonstrates that even as the
American political establishment moves ever further to the right, the
working class is shifting to the left.
The public opposition to Starr has confounded the right-wing conspirators,
the media, and the Democrats themselves. Expressed in this broad public
sentiment is a distrust of the entire political establishment, a more critical
attitude toward the media, and a growth of social discontent.
Workers need their own party
For the working class to defend its interests, its instinctive opposition to the
parties and policies of big business must be transformed into a conscious
political struggle against the capitalist system. This means, first and
foremost, a rejection of the two-party system and the building a new
political party of the working class.
The working class needs its own mass party in order to advance a socialist
program, which rejects the socially destructive workings of the capitalist
market and the subordination of humanity to the profit interests of a
privileged elite. Only when the working class takes control of the
productive forces of society will the conditions be created for economic life
to be planned and developed in a democratic and scientific way, so as to
serve human needs.
The Socialist Equality Party has been established to spearhead the struggle
to create a genuine political alternative for the working class. Our party
stands for the international unity of the working class. We reject all forms
of chauvinism and nationalism, which seek to divide workers in America
from their class brothers and sisters in Asia, Europe, Latin America or
Africa. The global economic crisis demonstrates that the working class
must have an international strategy to combat the anarchy of capitalism.
Within the United States, this means opposition to all forms of racism and
discrimination based on anti-immigrant bias or religious bigotry.
The SEP fights for social equality. The development of industry and
modern technology make possible the age-old dream of the greatest
thinkers in human history, the creation of a world free of want and
exploitation.
Social equality and democratic rights are incompatible with the continued
existence of the profit system. The SEP advocates the establishment of
social ownership and democratic control over the enormous productive
forces created by mankind. From mines and factories to computer
programs, these are social products created by the cooperative effort of
countless millions, yet they are under the control of a handful of
speculators, bankers and corporate bosses. The reorganization of
economic life under the democratic control of the producers will make
possible the development of society for the benefit of all of its members,
not just a privileged few.
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