We have a renewed spirit of power today as we come here 100,000 strong! In the ‘60’s hundreds of thousands came to the Capitol demanding Civil Rights and protesting the Vietnam war. And now, with the hard-hitting effects of the economic crisis, there is massive discontent among all working people. We didn’t create this crisis, and we’re not going to let it take everything we’ve work for!
This crisis that everyone’s talking about means just one thing – that we working people take the brunt of it. This is no secret, because we live through it every day. People say it’s just like the 30’s. But we say it’s going to be a lot worse!
In the 30’s Depression, there wasn’t enough money around to buy things. No jobs, no money, but also low prices. But today, there’s no jobs AND higher prices. That means “stagflation”, a combination of recession and inflation. The 30’s economy was like a simple bone fracture, today’s “stagflation” is like a compound fracture!
The unemployed numbers today is approaching very close to the 17-million peak of the 30’s. ONE OUT OF EVERY SIX PEOPLE IS OUT OF A JOB! This includes the “officially” unemployed, and those who’ve given up looking for jobs and are no longer counted on the unemployment lists, including all those hired by the armed forces who are not engaged in production or socially necessary labor (and the armed forces is much larger today). AND THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING!
Small and medium businesses got sucked under and swallowed by “big business” in the 30’s. But today, even big business like Franklin National Bank are going under, for only the biggest monopolies can survive. The economy is so bad, so unstable, banks have shied away from investing in industry and real production. They depend more and more on speculation in gold and currency fluctuations to make quick bucks.
So history doesn’t simply repeat itself. This crisis is repeating at a higher level, with all the basic problems worsened. Today the crisis is total, and it’s going to try to take a lot of people down with it.
But what is at the root of the problem? The root of the problem is capitalism. Capitalism causes recession because of its anarchic competition and drive for maximum profit through ever intensified exploitation of the workers. It’s unplanned and unregulated way of producing causes massive pileup of goods on the one hand and inability of the workers to buy them on the other. Recession is also caused by an increasingly unstable economy vulnerable to crisis due to over extension of borrowing in businesses. Capitalism causes inflation because of vast amounts of spending on military to expand and to secure markets abroad. $400 billion dollars has been spent on military since the Korean War. Inflation is furthered as the government is relying more and more on deficit financing – by printing up more and more money to pay bills – to balance its budget and to stimulate the economy. Now the crisis of inflation and recession, stagnation of economy, are compounded. It is coming down together due to the defeat of US Imperialism abroad because it can no longer plunder 3rd world countries and bully other weaker capitalist countries. We find ourselves in an international monetary and gold crisis because other capitalist countries such as European countries and Japan are refusing to allow the US economic crisis and inflation be imported to them through the acceptance of the US dollar as the standard (reserve currency).
So, it’s not like the depression in the 30’s. History just doesn’t simply repeat itself. It repeats at a higher level. Today the economic crisis is total. And it’s going to take a lot of people down with it.
As imperialism swings into this crisis, it gets more desperate than ever for new markets and conquests abroad. And this means war!
For more than 20 years it has been Vietnam. Today and tomorrow it may be the Middle East, the Persian Gulf or the Mediterranean. The two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, are both going for the top-dog spot in the world, and this crisis is driving them all the harder to try to slice up each other and the rest of the world. Why are they both arming-up in the Middle East and training GI’s for desert warfare? And why are they caught in a fierce arms race, piling up guns in Europe? For imperialism, the way out of this crisis is war abroad.
And at home? Here the monopoly capitalists are using the government courts and police to strip our rights and squeeze the last drops from us. Why are they training the Los Angeles police to control food riots? They are streamlining and centralizing their government machinery. Through Watergate, the real king Rockefeller has replaced the front-man Nixon.
And why are they trying to whip up racist hysteria against immigrant workers? Or take the Boston busing plan. The government has been chopping down education funds, and all working-class public schools, white and black, are going down the drain. But through its forced busing plan, the government pits poor whites against poor blacks, and while they fight each other the government gets off scott-free. And check out the dope and decadent culture. They push porno and racist books in the candy stores on the block, and cops and devil-worshippers in the movies. Now, when we have to be at our sharpest, they need us doped up on pornography, racism and god. These things are just the beginning. Every one of these attempts to split us workers – US born from immigrant, white from minority, men from women – is a step to weaken us all, a step towards fascism. Fascist rule of the capitalists depends on the splits in the working class. In this country, fascism will ride in through racism. The national minorities will be the immediate target and will suffer the most. Full-blown fascism, like in Nazi Germany, is the most straight-up violent rule of monopoly capitalism.
And for imperialism, the way out of this crisis is fascism at home.
Imperialism brings war. Imperialism brings fascism. It needs them in this crisis because they are its last hope to force the crisis onto us working folks at home and abroad. These are its “solution”!!
But there is a real way out. Imperialism is on the run in the world today. The Vietnamese and Cambodian people’s struggles for national liberation have thrown out the US-financed regimes of Thieu and Lon Nol, and are only hours from complete victory. Last year, the Portuguese colonialists were thrown out of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola. The African people’s fight against the racist South African and Rhodesian regimes is approaching victory with the support of oppressed people around the world, like the US longshoremen who refused to unload Rhodesian chrome. The Arab countries are uniting to take control of their natural oil resources, along with many other developing nations, striking real blows at the US and Soviet superpowers. Victory of their fight gives us inspiration at home! And the workers in the imperialist countries are close in step, with the rising number of strikes in France, Italy, Japan, the US and Soviet Union.
US workers, minorities and other oppressed folks have a history of tremendous struggles for our rights and interests. Following the hundreds of thousands of people who turned out in the 60’s for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War, today the struggles have moved into the factories and workplaces. Strikes and protests against unemployment, inflation and budget cuts are popping everywhere. The struggle has just begun! We have to take it up, and carry it through with vigor! For this represents hope, a great beginning to take over control of our own lives as the greatest class, the working class! For us, our future lies with socialist revolution. We have to use every protest and direct every streamlet and droplet of discontent into a single mighty torrent to overthrow capitalism. But the capitalist class, the Rockefellers and Kennedys will never go down peacefully. They won’t perish through elections and will put up a violent, life-and-death fight down to the last soldier and bullet before and after they are overthrown. And that’s why we got to thoroughly smash the old state machinery of the capitalist government. That’s why we will have to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule of the working class, to exercise rule and prevent this monster from making a come back, while we build socialism in the interests of American working class and all working people around the world.
Lately all kinds of folks, union “leaders” and even politicians, have been coming out for “big” reforms, or even for “socialism.”
Misleaders in our union and communities tell us to vote our way out of the crisis: “Reform the System!”, “Vote Democrat!”. Take the union hacks in District Council 37. They have always told us to pin our hopes on the political machinery and registering voters. Vote in Kennedy, vote in Humphrey, they said, and they would win us a fairer share of the pie. They tell us to settle for the lesser of the evils. McGovern was better than Nixon, they say now, and Ted Kennedy will be better than Rockefeller.
Sure, sure. But the fact is, these politicians and misleaders run in the big business crowd. They’re in for the money, in for the power and for themselves. They preach sharing the burden, tightening up our belts to pull America out of the crisis. They hold down our struggles and tell us to compromise, to sit down and arbitrate under collective bargaining. And meanwhile, they throw away our right to strike. This is exactly how I.W. Abel of the United Steel Workers bargained away that right with his Experimental Negotiating Agreement (ENA), without even a vote of the rank and file. They help the big media to whip up hatred among US workers against “illegal” aliens and foreign workers. For years now, the ILGWU has told us that foreign workers are responsible for taking away American jobs.
Many of these “leaders” talk loud and tough, but just to keep the rank and file cool. And when the rank and file is hot against layoffs and budget cuts or a lousy contract, they accept cheap tricks like cutting into our welfare funds, or attrition, speed-ups and “productivity plans”. In January ’75, NYC’s municipal union leaders, Gotbaum, DeLury and Feinstein met with Mayor Beame to reopen the contracts. And what did they do? They gave away any gains they made while splitting up the rank and file! They threw away the provisional workers to “save” the permanent employees, they forced the elderly to give up their jobs to the young, and women to give up their jobs to the men.
And if we still raise hell, they call a demonstration or two just to let off our steam and tire us out while walking in circles and listening to those same reform politicians. Forced to call some action, they make sure it’s “peaceful,” “orderly,” and costs the big corporations nothing.
These reform politicians and union “leaders” are capitalism’s most reliable supporters! Their sweet talk is the most dangerous to us! Their fine words blur our vision and soften our blows against the monopoly capitalists. They compromise with the big bosses and smother our anger under ballot sheets. They help the big businesses to divide white from minority, US from foreign workers, and men from women! And at this crucial time, when the government is gearing up for fascism and war, anything that stifles our revolutionary struggle and splits us up helps fascism!
Now all these labor leaders and politicians are pushing “reforms” like Roosevelt’s New Deal. But just how good a deal was that?
The New Deal of the 30’s handed out finances to the big businesses helping them to eat the small. Before World War II, New Deals like the National Recovery Act (NRA) under Roosevelt’s Emergency Regime, wiped out what remained of the old antitrust laws. So with the government’s help, bigger monopolies grew out of the depression.
The same NRA also drove down wages, by fixing below, starvation minimum wages that only helped to pull down the maximum wage. It boosted inflation with its big military spending, creating jobs without producing anything useful. Its “guaranteed right to organize” turned the Independent unions into company unions. And under the Wagner Bill, also palmed off as guaranteeing workers’ rights, it established binding arbitration and wiped out the right to strike. Under Roosevelt’s policy, striking workers were shot in western Pennsylvania and many unions were busted.
Today we have to think twice when we hear so many “progressive”-sounding solutions! Every union head seems to have his own “deal”. Take Leonard Woodcock’s economic program or action plan. The AFL-CIO proposes immediate reduction of interest rates, supported by the government; creation of public service jobs in health, housing, recreation, transportation and education; more aid to the unemployed through the reform of the Unemployment Insurance Benefit program; an immediate tax cut, favoring the poor, to stimulate the economy through added purchasing power; and a new national energy policy to reduce US dependence on imported oil. And what would these plans do? In the long run they would only adjust and fit themselves to the crisis and the government’s jive schemes. They never challenge the government’s policies, but actually help the bosses to “rationalize” and streamline the economy. Like the New Deal 30’s, this “progressive” deal of the 70’s would only help the government to centralize and concentrate its strength, setting all workers up for even tougher attacks in the future.
Nowadays, everyone from liberal democrats like Michael Harrington to the Communist Party USA are calling for a “mass party” to “vote the monopolies out of government”. They say that in 1976 we can have a “clean” government without the Nixons and Agnews, without ITT and the dairy industry. Sure, Nixon is already gone. But one thing Watergate showed us all is that the faces may change from Nixon to Ford to Rockefeller, but behind the new costumes, the same big corporations and banks, are still calling the shots. The call to “vote socialism into power” is another jive lie of those reformist misleaders to hold our struggle down in “safe”, legal chains.
These misleaders are all jumping out with their “solutions” now knowing the workers won’t take it lyin down anymore. Some seemingly more militant ones, knowing capitalism is bankrupt, Impossible to defend, are coming out but of course with those phony “socialist” solutions within the framework of capitalism. But this is nothing again except the latest trick to divert our struggle to finish off the capitalists once and for all. We know that struggle against these misleaders – the social-prop of the monopolies is a part of class struggle itself. For us to educate the masses of workers of their real nature and where they really stand through struggle is more than 2/3 of the way to proletarian revolution. Because blowing the cover of the misleadership in front of the masses of workers would leave ourselves, 90 million workers and a handful of monopoly capitalists. Without these misleaders, the monopoly capitalist will have no chance by themselves. That’s why struggle and exposure of the misleaders is crucial and a big part of our struggle against capitlism, and to educate and train ourselves to fight for socialism.
That’s why we must take up the fight to defend our day to day rights and standard of living, as oppressed minorities, as women, and as workers, not in a reformist way. As V.I. Lenin, a great Russian revolutionary put it “...it is necessary to formulate and put forward all these demands, not in a reformist, but in a revolutionary way; not by keeping within the framework of bourgeois legality, but by breaking through it; not by confining oneself to parliamentary speeches and verbal protests, but by drawing the masses into real action, by widening and fomenting the struggle for every kind of fundamental democratic demand, right up to and including the direct onslaught of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, i.e., to the socialist revolution, which will expropriate the bourgeoisie.”
The working class has nothing to lose except our chains. We have the whole world to gain!!