------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the July 15, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
THE ANTI-LABOR OFFENSIVE, FROM REAGAN TO BUSH
By Fred Goldstein
The "anybody but Bush" movement is looking to John Kerry to halt the shift in the rightward direction of politics in the U.S. The underlying assumption is that the right-wing program of the Bush administration is so qualitatively different from that of previous administrations that even those who voted for a third-party candidate during the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000 must now retreat from their position and rush to vote for Kerry.
There are fundamental problems with this reasoning. First, U.S. politics have been moving sharply to the right without letup since the Reagan administration. This right-wing turn, which started gradually under Carter, was abruptly accelerated under Reagan because it reflected the general orientation of the ruling class.
It has been implemented uniformly by both capitalist parties since then, each carrying out this reactionary orientation in its own way. The Republicans, whose voting base is the big capitalists, the more reactionary sections of the middle class and the backward sections of the higher-paid white workers, carry out this policy more openly and directly. The Democratic Party, whose voting base is the progressive middle class and the progressive movement in general, the lower-paid workers--organized and unorganized--the urban masses and the oppressed people in general, carries it out in a more disguised and demagogic manner.
But while each party has a different voting base, and therefore has different political methods and at times even sharply different orientations, they both have long demonstrated their absolute allegiance to capitalism and imperialism. And they are tied in a thousand ways to the giant transnational corporations, the banks and the military- industrial complex that dominate ruling-class politics.
KERRY WELL CONNECTED
These ties to the ruling class are personified in John Kerry. His family's personal wealth is estimated at between $700 and $950 million. If he were elected he would be the richest man ever to be president.
His family fortune includes the Heinz empire--one of the largest food corporations in the world with global sales of $9.4 billion in 2003. It exploits 48,500 workers directly in its employ. It has 22 factories in the U.S. and 57 factories abroad. It markets its products in over 200 countries and territories. It is number 206 on the Fortune 500 list. It is the quintessential transnational corporation with a global outlook on protecting the financial and corporate interests of U.S. imperialism.
Kerry himself is a trusted part of the capitalist political establishment. He has been in the millionaires' club called the U.S. Senate for two decades. He is a leading member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Communications Committee. As such he has been entrusted with the most secret and sensitive business of the ruling class. He is a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, which turned the Democratic Party sharply to the right in the wake of the two- term-triumph of former President Ronald Reagan in order to adapt to Reaganism and the new right-wing political order demanded by the ruling class starting at the end of the 1970s.
And while Kerry's wealth and upbringing might predispose him personally to be dedicated to preserving the imperialist order, it is not his wealth alone which is decisive in evaluating whether or not to vote for him. What is decisive is that the Democratic Party is an institution whose top leadership is beholden to the ruling class whose corporate interests are driving the turn to the right. The only way that the masses of people can turn the right-wing atmosphere around is by opening up a struggle, in the streets, in the offices, factories, campuses, communities.
Passively relying upon the capitalist political parties and the electoral process to improve the conditions of the people only gives the ruling class additional incentive to take more and more for themselves. So long as they can take away health care, housing, welfare, child care, and bust unions, destroy affirmative action, or go to war without fear of mass resistance and social instability they will continue their reactionary course.
Kerry will do it his way. Bush will do it his way. But they will both do it.
SWEENEY AND KERRY
Among Kerry's advisers is Warren Buffett, of the investment corporation Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett is the second-richest man in the world. Other Kerry advisers include John Corzine, former co-chair of Goldman Sachs & Co., a giant investment bank, and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the head of Citigroup.
But, shamefully, sitting alongside these millionaires and billionaires is John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO.
If anyone should know what this means, it should be organized labor. It is like taking poison for the working class to tie itself to the political leadership of the ruling-class parasites that live off the blood and sweat of the workers.
Sweeney is looking for the inside track to get the capitalist government to help arrest the slide in the labor movement. It is typical of the "anybody but Bush" syndrome.
The labor movement, the only classwide organization of the working class within capitalist society, was built up by the blood and sacrifice of generations of workers. Despite its numerical decline in the recent period, it is still made up of 13 million members and as such is in the most strategic position from which to launch the counterattack against the 25 years of Reaganite assaults on the labor movement and on all the social and economic gains of the masses.
Sweeney, by sitting as Kerry's adviser, is hoping to protect labor's interests from inside the capitalist establishment. But Sweeney should remember who he is sitting next to: the representatives of the very bankers and bosses who were behind the Reaganite union-busting attack on labor, who financed the vast corporate restructuring that threw millions of workers out of their jobs, devastated the industrial infrastructure, used technology to drive down wages, sent runaway plants overseas to oppressed countries and strongly undermined the labor union movement.
It should be clear to any labor leader who cares to look, that the orientation of the capitalist state in the last 25 years has been one of unrestrained assault on the workers.
QUARTER CENTURY OF 'REAGANISM'
The most important legislation put forward by the transnational corporations during the Clinton administration, from a purely economic point of view, was the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
The passage of NAFTA is regarded by the AFL-CIO as the biggest attack on labor since Reagan. Clinton defied his own party, many of whom rely on the votes of the workers, to twist arms and bloc with the Gingrich Republican leadership to get NAFTA passed by a handful of votes.
Clinton put the capitalist government fully behind the expansionary corporate needs of the transnationals and he put the interests of the labor movement on the chopping block. This allowed the ruling class to take maximum advantage of the scientific-technological revolution in communications and transportation to expand the corporate restructuring to Mexico and to ride roughshod over workers on both sides of the border.
On the other hand, the most important legislation put forward by the labor movement under the Clinton administration was the "replacement worker" bill. When the crucial bill, promoted by the labor movement, came up in Congress to stop the wave of corporate hiring of "replacement workers"--i.e. scabs--to break strikes and unions, Clinton behaved completely differently from his all-out, no-holds-barred struggle for NAFTA.
The bill was an attempt to stop what had been an illegal practice under New Deal labor law: the firing of striking workers and the hiring of scabs. It affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and the security of the entire labor movement.
Clinton turned his back and quietly let the bill fail. It was a harsh blow to the workers, quite without fanfare, and it was an extraordinary political setback and embarrassment for the AFL-CIO leadership. The Clinton attack on labor was so harsh that even his mildly liberal secretary of labor, Robert Reich, quit in disgust.
NEW DEAL AND RAW DEAL
The Clinton record has important implications for the "anybody but Bush" approach. What was Clinton doing? He was giving passive support to the state-backed, scab-herding movement openly and aggressively proclaimed by Reagan during the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike of 1981.
It was known by the Carter administration that the PATCO workers were under the extraordinary pressure of heavy workloads in tense situations. They were demanding improved working conditions. Carter knew this and stonewalled them. Thus, they endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election. Without the workers' knowledge, Carter drew up a plan to combat a possible strike when the contract ran out after the election.
Carter lost and Reagan took office. Reagan took to the airwaves to make a public threat to the workers that if they walked out he would fire them all. PATCO tried to uphold its position and walked out. Reagan gave the workers 48 hours to come back or be fired. He then fired 11,800 workers, took the unprecedented measure of barring them for life from employment, arrested the leaders of the union and hired scab replacements.
This act was a complete reversal of the fundamental rights of workers inscribed in the National Labor Relations Act and other legislation that was won during the Roosevelt New Deal. Through mass struggle, millions of workers had won the right to form unions, the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike.
Of course Reagan used the pretext that this was a government union that had no right to strike in order to justify his brutal treatment of the PATCO workers. But most importantly his open defiance of the AFL-CIO-- which formally backed the PATCO workers--and his blatantly anti-labor proclamations, sent a signal to the bosses that this was a new day. Washington would do nothing to restrain them from scab-herding and would use the state to assist them where necessary. There were to be no more compromises with the labor movement.
Of course Reagan restructured the National Labor Relations Board, which was supposed to give the workers the mechanism to vote in unions, in a completely corporate direction. He appointed Ray Donovan, an anti-labor businessperson, as his secretary of labor.
In general, Reagan began the full-scale assault on the New Deal Era victories of the workers, at the behest of the bosses, as part of a broader attempt to rebuild the dominant position of the U.S. capitalist class at home and abroad.
When Carter planned the assault on PATCO, which he never got to carry out, he was already beginning the new orientation.
When Clinton destroyed the welfare system, forced NAFTA through, allowed the continuation of the assault on labor, and pushed through the Effective Death Penalty provision and "anti-terrorism" laws, he was continuing the reorientation of the ruling class and its state begun by Reagan. It is no accident that it was Clinton who declared "The era of big government is over." Big government is a codeword for the New Deal and for the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson--which was forced to affirm civil rights, voting rights, desegregation and many other rights won in the struggle.
Should Kerry be elected, he would be subject to the same ruling-class discipline. The ruling class is oriented to world domination and attacks on the workers and oppressed. They may want to do it in a more measured and effective style than the Bush administration has demonstrated. But Kerry's position on the U.S. military occupation--of "stay the course" and send more troops--shows above all that he is completely in harmony with the ruling class. And this harmony will exhibit itself in domestic policy just as much as in imperialist foreign policy.
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