Trends in imperialism bring struggle home

Fred Goldstein WW photo

Now who would have thought six months or a year ago, even if you were in Los Angeles, even if you were in the center of the immigrants’ rights movement, that there would have been several million people on the streets across this country, in this reactionary heartland, in the “belly of the beast,” in a general political strike, demanding their rights?

This momentous development was touched off by a reactionary attack in the legislature on 12 million people and all their friends, families and supporters. But there is another dimension, for Marxism is dialectical. It looks at the motion of things. It looks beneath the surface of things to find their essence. It is the doctrine of development.

The stage for the demonstration was set long ago. It was set when the Reagan administration together with the bankers initiated the campaign of neoliberal aggression, and they sent the Inter na tional Monetary Fund to every capital of every country in the oppressed world to tell them that the day of austerity is here, you have to cut all subsidies to the masses, you have to privatize everything and you have to lower your tariffs and let us in to do as we please in your country. That’s when it began in Mexico, in Central America, in Africa, in Asia.

And this continued under Clinton with NAFTA, and under Bush with CAFTA. And it created a huge wave of impoverished people who were assaulted by imperialist finance capital and were driven toward the rich capitalist countries in order to find a living for themselves and their families.

This is when the material for this demonstration was created.

U.S. imperialism concentrated the proletariat and sections of the rural population from many regions of the world, especially in Latin America, into the meatpacking industry, the construction industry, the textile industry and the service industries. It concentrated them in the towns and the cities here, the way they are doing around the world now.

This May 1 demonstration was the climax of that process. It’s part of a long development that was slow and under the surface and which burst out. Now we need to see if there are other processes, analogous to this, that are going on in the imperialist world that tend in this direction.

This tolerance of immigration by the imperialists fits with their long-term intention to take the U.S. from being a high-wage country—as it was after World War II for a section of the white workers who predominated in the labor movement —to a low-wage country. They are in a capitalist crisis which forces them to sell more and more goods flowing from their vast means of production to make their profits.

This began in the 1970s and the 1980s, when they took technology to try to dismantle much of the manufacturing industry and weaken and destroy the unions. They have taken this technology and expanded into a vast reserve army of low-paid labor, and have forced the working class in this country into a competition with this vast, global network of labor in low-wage countries.

They want to destroy the social wage the workers are entitled to—whether it be welfare, Medicaid, Medicare or food stamps. This is neoliberalism in the United States. This is what the IMF does in oppressed countries. Only they do not need the IMF here. They are the IMF. They have the capitalist government, the Treasury Depart ment, the Federal Reserve Bank.

Clinton destroyed welfare. Fifty years of social gains were destroyed by Clinton at the behest of the bankers. That’s neoliberalism in the United States.

So this is a whole current. And it derives from their insatiable drive for profit and super-profit. But what does it do? It undermines the basis of social stability in this country.

I don’t want to dwell on it, but when you consider that they’re trying to turn this into a low-wage country and they’re trying to conquer the world, and they face an economic crisis, you see there are undercurrents, you see how the trends in imperialism today lead in the direction of social upheaval and rebellion. Where? When? How? We do not have a crystal ball. But what we do see is the laws of capitalism, as understood by Marx, operating in the social and economic sphere, and politically. And they cannot get out of this, the imperialists. They cannot go on the way they are.

—Fred Goldstein, Secretariat, WWP