 Labor strikes and protests bring workers together in struggle. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
“The PSL: Who We Are, What We Stand For” was approved and adopted by the National Steering Committee of the PSL in January 2005. It is the product of an extended discussion at the Party’s founding convention. The document includes the Party’s assessment of the current international and domestic situation as well as its perspective on the need to build a revolutionary workers’ party in the United States.
Besides the section excerpted here, the pamphlet includes chapters addressing the validity of Marxism and Leninism, the U.S. drive for global domination, the emergence of a new world movement, and the need for a revolutionary party. It addresses critical issues such as the overthrow of the Soviet Union, the United States and the Middle East, China, revolutionary Cuba, and U.S. imperialism’s “National Security Strategy.”
Readers who are interested in learning more about the Party for Socialism and Liberation are strongly urged to send for, and help distribute, copies of this new pamphlet. It is an excellent resource for organizing a study or discussion group.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation recognizes that the multinational U.S. working class is the indispensable force for revolution in the United States. Its social force is magnified by the central role of U.S. imperialism in the world economy. The task of breaking the chains of wage labor in the U.S. is intimately tied to the struggle of people around the world for national liberation and social revolution.
More and more, speaking in the United States of “foreign” versus “domestic” policy creates a false dichotomy. The war and occupation in Iraq, for example, is not just an “international” issue. It affects hundreds of thousands of working-class families across the United States—just as the Vietnam War did at an earlier time. Taken together, Washington’s policies at home and abroad are integrated in a global war waged by U.S. imperialism against the workers and poor of the world.
“Endless war” against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Haiti and other countries inevitably means war against the multinational working class here as well. It is the sons and daughters of the working class, disproportionately people of color, who are subjected to an economic draft—fighting, killing and dying for the interests of profit and empire. Education, health care, public and subsidized housing, jobs and job training, welfare, childcare and other vital social programs have been gutted, privatized or entirely eliminated as real military spending has risen above a half-trillion dollars annually. Social Security is on the chopping block.
Every new military adventure means an acceleration of the militarization of U.S. society and of other reactionary, anti-working class trends as well.
U.S. militarism and imperialist globalization policies have a profound impact on the composition and conditions of the U.S. working class. With the gutting of national economies from Mexico to Haiti, for example, millions of workers have immigrated to the United States. In 2000, more than one in three residents of New York City was born outside the United States.
The working class under attack
Living and working conditions have been declining for large sections of the U.S. working class for the past three decades in the face of a massive corporate offensive. The deterioration of real wages and benefits like health care and pensions is accelerating at a rate only matched by the increasing wealth hoarded by an ever-smaller handful of banks and the super rich. There is no indication that this offensive is slowing. The U.S. and global capitalist economy will inevitably experience a classic economic depression or recession. But even before the onset of capitalist contraction, tens of millions of workers are facing a deepening crisis of how to pay for the basic necessities of life—housing, food, clothing, medical care, childcare and education.
The high-tech revolution that began in the 1970s ushered in both a restructuring of the economy and a long-term decline in real wages and social benefits. The massive layoffs due to technological development and the flight of capital decimated entire communities and continue to pose a huge challenge to the labor movement. Urban centers with large African American and Latino communities saw unemployment rates soar.
Not coincidentally, the overthrow of the socialist camp was followed in short order by the near elimination of the “social safety net” in the United States welfare, food stamps and other nutrition programs, housing assistance and other key services were wiped out or drastically reduced by the combined efforts of a Democratic White House and Republican Congress in 1995-96.
The monstrous growth of the prison system, largely devoid of any education or job-training programs, means that today more than two million people—disproportionately from oppressed communities—are “warehoused” in concentration camps for the poor. More than seven million people are “in the system”: behind bars or on parole or probation. The U.S. prison population is the world’s largest. More than 3,000 prisoners are facing the racist and anti-worker death penalty.
Almost one in four African American men between the ages of 20 and 29 are “in the system,” compared to one in 10 Latino men and one in 16 white men.
In a state that falsely poses as the paragon of “democracy,” political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and the Cuban Five, to name just a few, have been sentenced to execution or life imprisonment. Torture has become commonplace, not only in the U.S.-administered prisons in Iraq and the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, but in the prisons inside the United States as well.
The health care crisis is intensifying rapidly in the United States. The root cause is that health care and services are treated as any other commodity under capitalism; they are produced by the health industry capitalists not primarily to meet human needs but for profit. The giant hospital, pharmaceutical, medical equipment and, especially, the powerful and parasitic insurance companies are reaping enormous profits from private health care. The huge mark-ups in the prices of health care goods and services have created a spiraling crisis and the deprivation of health benefits to tens of millions of people in the United States. Over the past five years, health care premiums have increased at three to four times the rate of inflation, between 10-15 percent annually.
HIV/AIDS drugs that can be produced for less than $300 cost up to $15,000 per year in the United States because the big pharmaceutical monopolies are producing for profit and blocking the use of drugs produced by generic manufacturers in other countries. Though sub-Saharan Africa has just over 10 percent of the world’s population, it is home to two-thirds of the people in the world who are infected with HIV and AIDS. Less than one percent of them have access to existing drugs.
In the United States, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is also a crisis, and today is the leading cause of death among African Americans between the ages of 25 and 44.
Capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for profit has intensified the attacks on the environment. The “war on terrorism” and “homeland security” have been used to justify drastically lower air quality standards, opening up the Arctic and other areas for mineral and timber exploitation, and environmental racism—toxic and radioactive waste dumping in predominantly oppressed communities. Washington, acting on behalf of corporate polluters, has refused to sign even such a modest global warming agreement as the Kyoto Protocol.
These unprecedented attacks and intensified exploitation form the objective basis for a massive counter offensive led by the working class. The task facing all those who aspire to provide leadership to this counter offensive is developing the analysis, strategy and tactics to unleash the historic power of our class.
 Photo: Bill Hackwell |
Since its inception, U.S. society has been marked by extreme racism. This has been the predominant obstacle to confronting the ruling class offensive.
The struggle of those who have been most oppressed by the racist system has led to major legal, social and economic reforms. Nonetheless, pervasive racism remains a dominant fact of life. Youth from the African American, Latino and other nationally oppressed communities are confronted daily with police brutality and murder. They routinely face racist profiling in commercial establishments, as well as being shut out and “tracked” by racist practices in the educational system. The ruling class assault on hard won gains from past decades continues.
Affirmative action and equal education are under attack by the ruling class and its governments at federal and state levels. Affirmative action, which had barely begun to redress the gross inequalities suffered by oppressed nationalities and women, has been rolled back, gutted and repealed outright in many areas. A number of other gains that were won in the wake of the mass Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s—like women’s rights, lesbian/gay/bi/trans rights, equal marriage rights, and disabled rights—are suffering a similar fate.
On the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education in 2004, the “separate and unequal” resegregation of public schools, which were never more than partially desegregated, is notoriously widespread. For African American and other students of color attending integrated schools, patterns of racism impose an array of obstacles to achieving “equal education.”
Public education for all working-class children and youth has been allowed to deteriorate to the extreme. For many students, especially African American, Latino, Native, Asian, Arab and working-class whites, the alternatives are the military, low-paid jobs or prison once their “education” is completed.
As an oppressed nation within the United States, the African American population continues to lag behind the majority white population in every social index. African American, Latino and other communities of color still occupy the most exploited segment of the working class, facing grinding poverty, unemployment and low wages compounded by racist violence and police state terror.
The capitalist state has deepened the exploitation of immigrants by means of repressive legislation and denial of elementary rights. Mass roundups and deportations of undocumented immigrants are meant to terrorize, subjecting them to even more extreme exploitation. The aim is also to divide and weaken the working class and force down the wages of all workers.
The PSL defends the right of self-determination for oppressed nations within the United States. At the same time, we fight for the unity of the multinational working class against our common enemy, the racist capitalist class of bankers and corporate owners.
Women’s continuing subordinate position in society, at home and on the job, originated in the rise of class society. It has been compounded today by cuts in welfare benefits, childcare and health care, as well as by racism. Women continue to be subjected to violence and exploitation in capitalist society.
Women’s reproductive rights are under continued attack at the federal and state level. The huge April 2004 demonstration of more than one million women and their allies in Washington, D.C., in defense of women’s right to choose—whatever its limitations in political orientation toward the Democratic Party and its limited mobilization of women of color—was a powerful demonstration of the power of a grassroots movement, the primary barrier to the rollback of women’s rights.
Over the past three decades or more, there have been important partial gains toward equal rights achieved through mass struggle by the lesbian, gay, bi and trans communities. Now, a fierce battle is raging over same-sex marriage and the entitlement of same-sex couples to equal rights and benefits.
The ruling class resistance to extending basic civil marriage rights to same-sex couples is not based only on reactionary ideology. Even where domestic partnership exists, more than 1,000 rights and benefits extended to heterosexual couples are denied to same-sex partners. Denial of these same benefits means additional billions in profit for the capitalists, giving a material basis for reactionary anti-gay ideas.
A massive attack has been launched on civil rights and liberties. Immigrants have been hard hit, particularly immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries, through the USA Patriot Act and other legislation and executive orders. Torture, long-term imprisonment without charge or the right to legal counsel, secret court proceedings and more have been declared legal and acceptable by the highest government officials.
The U.S. working class continues to be stratified along economic lines and divided by racism, sexism, bigotry and national chauvinism. At the same time, the continually evolving character of capitalist technology is having dramatic and generally leveling effects on the working class. The working class is becoming more multinational and more integrated, at the same time as exploitation is intensifying, creating the conditions for a rise in class-consciousness.
 Nearly 80 percent of U.S. workers now work in the service sector. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
At important points in history, unions have played an important role in advancing the fight for workers, organized and unorganized. Although the leadership of the AFL-CIO union federation has been historically infected by racism, bureaucracy, chauvinism and ties to the government—especially since the anti-communist purges of the 1940s—labor strikes and protests have brought workers together in struggle across the many divides that are reinforced throughout capitalist society. In recent years, there has been a growing struggle inside the labor movement to oppose the Iraq war and to make the connection between militarism, war and capitalist globalization.
The struggle to simply maintain health care coverage has become the central issue in union negotiations and strikes across the United States. Union organizing, especially in the private sector, has been made more difficult than at any time since the early 1930s. The massive relocation of industry and manufacturing out of the United States or into more isolated rural and semi-rural areas, combined with anti-labor government policies, has had the effect of further reducing the percentage of unionized workers. Today, less than 13 percent of all employees in the U.S. are union members, the lowest percentage in 70 years.
The continued interconnections between top labor leaders and the imperialist state produce shameful class betrayals like aid to the corrupt and counterrevolutionary “labor leaders” in Venezuela; refusal to recognize the connection between the war budget and economic attacks on workers; silence on the Iraq war; and unconditional support for Israel. This relationship also hamstrings the labor movement as a progressive force in U.S. society. The labor leadership has subordinated itself to the Democratic Party.
Yet unions remain the most numerous and powerful organizations of the working class. They must be renewed and strengthened for the struggle to go forward.
