First Published: Workers Viewpoint, vo.. 5, No. 19, June 2, 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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For millions of Americans, the 1970’s have been a decade of shattered aspirations. Their hopes for securing a higher standard of living, for saving enough to pay for their children’s education and for proving a little more for their retirement are daily crushed by inflation and economic stagnation.
These are not the words of an outspoken critic of capitalism. They are the words of the bourgeoisie’s own – George Bush, running for the presidency of the United States. Far from the sterile patriotic rhetoric of America as the land of opportunity and freedom, it is an admission of the worst economic and political crisis the U.S. has ever faced.
This is the context that the 1980 presidential election is taking place, perhaps the most crucial for the bourgeoisie. And in these devastating times, the choice that faces the workers and the poor is the most critical in the history of this country. We could allow the bourgeoisie to rule and bring economic catastrophe, fascism, and world war with the other superpower, the Soviet Union, with its untold suffering. Or we could overthrow the capitalist system and the false hopes of its sham democracy and step out on the road of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the only road that can turn this capitalist hell around.
In the 80’s, the very rule of the bourgeoisie is on the line. Miami and the murders of the CWP 5 have changed the political scene dramatically. They spoke volumes for the U.S. people, pushed against the wall and pressed ever more cruelly by the deepest and most extensive economic crisis ever, making the Great Depression of the 30’s look like a picnic. The bourgeoisie today sit on a politically volatile, inflammable, and fragile – a literal volcano that can be touched off by the very act of a parking ticket, threatening to spread to the Miamis across the country – black and white crushed by the crisis the bourgeoisie has created.
Internationally, the U.S. faces the raging tide of the third world’s resistance, as in Iran and Nicaragua with South Korea rocked by massive armed resistance to the U.S.-backed fascist regime. OPEC far, from being split up, is more united than ever in resisting the U.S.’ attempt to export the crisis. Even second world countries, are fighting U.S. domination for their own interests, as their lukewarm Iran sanctions show. Today, there is no way for the U.S. to prevent the chickens from coming home to roost.
Faced with the deepest economic crisis ever, unable to agree among themselves on how to get out. faced with the erupting volcano of mass discontent fed up with the bankrupt politicians served up as candidates, the bourgeoisie faces the choice of losing their rule or trying to get out through fascism and world war. To attack abroad, they have to attack the people of the U.S. first. Thus, unlike the 60’s unable to offer even the smallest reforms, they are at this very moment trying to institute fascism. They do it through means such as the criminal code revision – backed by Kennedy – and the CIA charter, which would make the government’s dirty work legal and strip, the masses of practically every legal right to resist their attacks.
And the rising specter of communism haunts the bourgeoisie day and night. Far from cowing the Communist Workers Party and the masses, the murders of our comrades Jim Waller. Cesar Cauce. Mike Nathan. Bill Sampson and Sandy Smith by the KKK/Nazis/FBI and the indictment of the Greensboro 6 only unleash the fury and hatred of every justice-loving American. We have and will continue to serve notice to the bourgeoisie, as we have to top spy Civiletti, Kennedy and Mondale, penetrating their inner sanctums and their every attempt to hide their true faces from the people. And we will avenge our comrades’ heroic deaths by leading the U.S. people to overthrow this rotten system of capitalism.
Faced with this unprecedentedly critical situation, the bourgeoisie is scrambling to find a way to prevent the hemorrhaging of the electoral system – the system of choosing who will lead the capitalists in driving the crisis down our throats and trying to crush our revolutionary resistance in the 80’s.
One of the possibilities is Anderson who has now declared himself an independent candidate. With the majority of even the backward sector of the masses, who cling hope against hope to the electoral system, fed up with the current crop of Democrats and Republicans – the twin parties of war and crisis – a sector of the bourgeoisie have latched on to the Anderson bandwagon. This includes Felix Rohatyn, the head of New York’s financial oversight body, Big MAC, and George Ball, the senior diplomat and trusted bourgeois statesman.
Playing on the disgust of the masses with the tarnished names of Carter, Reagan and Kennedy, Anderson is presenting himself, much like Carter in 1976, as the outsider – a politician whose name is clean. Significantly, a recent poll has shown that if the election were held now. Anderson would run neck and neck with Carter and Reagan.
But would Anderson be different? What would a President Anderson mean to the workers and poor of this country? Let’s look at Anderson’s program for the economy.
First of all, Anderson wants an immediate 50 cent tax on gasoline. On top of that Anderson is calling for a wage freeze. He would back this up with tax credits for companies that held wage increases below a guideline and punish companies with taxes that give the workers a better contract than the guidelines would allow. Moreover. Anderson is calling for a $3.5 billion cut in social security and government pension payments, which means the elderly will be literally driven to starvation and death. This liberal would also cut $1.4 billion from energy-assistance payments to the poor, pitting the South and Southwest against the Northeast, where he says, “it’s needed more.” And while throwing a sop to the masses with a gradually phased-in interest exemption from taxes from $200 to $750 and “some kind of protection” from being driven into higher tax brackets from inflation, he would shower the monopolies with a two per cent cut in corporate taxes by 1986 and more tax write-offs through allowing accelerated depreciation.
Thus far from being independent of the bourgeoisie, the Anderson difference actually is no difference at all. All bourgeois politicians serve the interests of the monopoly capitalist class. Under the system of bourgeois democracy the masses have only one clear choice if we are to determine our own destiny. And that is to destroy this nightmare called capitalism completely and irreversibly and to build our own future under the total revolutionary reorganization of the U.S. – the dictatorship of the proletariat in the U.S.A.
This August, the Democratic Party will hold their presidential nominating convention in New York City. To serve notice to the bourgeoisie that the countdown to the end of their rule has begun, to expose their true faces behind the web of lies and deceptions, to show the American people that only by taking the road of revolutionary socialism can our tremendous suffering of this capitalist hell be ended – for these and for the hundreds of years of blood debts yet to be collected from the bourgeoisie by the masses, and especially the murders of the Communist Workers Party 5 (Jim Waller, Cesar Cauce, Mike Nathan, Bill Sampson and Sandy Smith) the Communist Workers Party is calling on all who want to see this system of minority rule of the finance capitalists ended once and for all to join us in taking our message to the bourgeoisie directly in the streets at the convention site – Madison Square Garden.
While the bourgeoisie wants to have a peaceful Garden Party, with business as usual, we will crash their party and turn it into their nightmare. With millions upon millions suffering in every city, town and community in the country, unemployed, on welfare, in the factories and mines, and everyday getting more desperate as the crisis plunges deeper, the bourgeoisie leaves us no choice today but to die. And either we die like caged animals waiting for the slaughter to get to us or we fight and grab at our chance to turn this hell around.
SERVE NOTICE TO THE BOURGEOISIE, CRASH THE GARDEN PARTY!
AVENGE THE CWP 5!
PREPARE FOR THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT IN THE 80’s!