The anti-labor offensive, from Reagan to Bush
Part 4
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.
Reprinted from the July 15, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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