During the Great Depression of the 1930s, it took several years for the working class to take decisive action against the capitalists that had plunged the country and the world into deep misery. There were general strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco in 1934, sit-down strikes that paralyzed industries in 1937-38, and thousands of marches and confrontations nationwide as radicalizing workers, employed and unemployed, lost their fear and took to the streets.
We are now three years into the “great recession” that began in 2008, and there are stirrings of struggle that suggest the possibility for a new wave of workers’ action.
The capitalist class sees every economic crisis as both a challenge and an opportunity. In financial terms, it disrupts their ability to maintain their normal rates of profit, while creating the opportunity for greater consolidation and monopolization. In political terms, while it exposes the contradictions of the system, it is also an opportunity for the capitalist class to take the offensive.
It is a crisis of their making, but it is our class—we who have done nothing to cause it—that suffers more, and becomes more vulnerable. In workplaces across the country, from offices to factories to retail stores, managers and supervisors are forcing their employees to accept more work, forced overtime, shorter breaks and all sorts of petty indignities and abuses. They are eliminating regular raises, and in some places forcing workers to take pay cuts.
The stubbornly high rate of unemployment, which went up again in May, has become a factor in the consciousness of both boss and worker. Feeling “lucky” just to have a job, workers are less willing to challenge their employers, who in turn become more confident to make new demands.
This on-the-ground economic reality directly translates into the larger field of politics. Using sophisticated advertising campaigns, lobbyists, and their vast economic power, the biggest banks and corporations are going after workers’ rights and social programs more boldly than they have in decades.
The banks and corporations have a few tools at their disposal to guarantee their dictatorship over government policies.
For one, they have thousands of politicians nationwide, Democratic and Republican, from city council members to U.S. Senators, in their pockets. Their careers are quite literally indebted to Wall Street.
Secondly, they threaten to withhold investment or move elsewhere unless taxes and regulation are reduced.This is the logic President Obama used last year when signing the timid bank regulatory bill, which allows the banks to engage in much of the same wild speculation and predatory lending that precipitated the current crisis. It’s the logic he used to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, is using the same logic to push through a law that will force localities to cap property taxes—a move that will certainly decimate education and other services.
In some places, the banks using their arbitrary bond ratings to take government spending hostage. Local and state governments rely on outside short-term loans and long-term bonds from private investors and banks. These are used to carry on a government’s normal functioning: to make payroll, to finance construction and other infrastructure projects. During recessions, when tax revenue is down, this dependence on the private banks becomes even sharper. In localities across the country, the banks have come along and threatened to turn off that funding, or raise interest rates, unless the government cuts education, mass transit, and other social services. This is even happening in Montgomery County, Maryland, the richest county in the country.
Where the Democrats are not completely siding with Republicans, their strategy has been to suggest other cuts: give up your benefits to save your salary, or give up social programs to save government jobs.
But clearly, the battle over the budget is not simply a matter of dollars and cents. It is a question of who holds economic power and uses that power to determine politics.
To effectively challenge the cutbacks and the assault on workers’ rights, we must raise an alternative vision for society. Why should the banks and corporations have the right to sit on the wealth that we produce, when we need it to create jobs? Why should the vast wealth of society sit in private bank accounts, when we can use it to make health care, housing, jobs and food basic rights guaranteed by law? Why should governments rely on privately-run, for-profit financial institutions to create new infrastructure or make payroll?
The alternative to this capitalist system is socialism, and we need it now, not in some distant future or far-off utopia. Capitalism only offers a continuous cycle of recessions and depressions, with each one leading to new levels of misery for the working class and new levels of decadence for the rulers.
There is a power that can get us out of this cycle. The 26-day occupation of the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin was a glimpse of that power. The revolution in Egypt was a glimpse of that power. There have been militant marches on Wall Street, and occupations of other State Capitol buildings. Now we need to widen these struggles, and ultimately turn them from defensive into offensive actions to remake society.
