United States:
After Seattle

Peter Johnson
13 June 2001

The political situation in the US, as in most other countries these days, is complex and contradictory. After nine years of expansion, the US economy is faltering and on the brink of a recession. After eight years of Bill Clinton's “I feel your pain” rhetoric and neoliberal policies, the US ruling class, with George Bush Jr., is aligning its rhetoric with its policies and attempting to make the latter more consistent. Workers, blacks, Latinos, and youth are the most combative they've been since the early 1980s, but they haven't yet overcome the effects of twenty years of retreat, let alone the political confusion and class-collaborationist leadership that led to the retreat.

The recession may chill the class struggle temporarily, as workers and youth struggle individually to survive. But it should also increase their alienation, intensify their anger, and provoke sharper struggle as the economy revives. Over the longer run, the ratcheting down of living standards for most of the population, the widening gap between wages and profits, the ever-worsening situation of blacks and Latinos, renewed attacks on the rights of women and gays, and the disaffection of youth make struggle inevitable.

The key question is whether, in the course of the struggle, the working class is able to overcome its deficits in consciousness, organization, and leadership enough to win lasting gains by ending the rule of capital and building a just and humane socialist society.

Thousands of subjective revolutionaries in the US, nearly all of them outside revolutionary organizations, are engaged in the struggle and see the need to build political consciousness, organization, and leadership. Many even see the need for a Leninist vanguard party in the US and a revolutionary International. But the road from here to there is difficult, and no one can foresee its twists and turns. It is, nonetheless, the road we must travel.

The US economy: On the brink of a recession

>From 1992 to 1996 the US economy slowly recovered from the last recession. Then it accelerated and continued to grow relatively rapidly until 2000. Bourgeois optimists attributed this to a new economic order based on high technology (computers, telecommunications, the Internet, biochemicals, etc.); the working-class retreat, euphemized as “realism about the need for restructuring”; the reabsorption of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China into the world market; and neoliberal “globalization”. Euphoric speculators bid the US and other stock markets to absurd heights.

By 1999 the long expansion had tightened the US labor market enough so that wages began to rise, squeezing profits from the cost side, just as overproduction was beginning to squeeze them from the price side. The speculators had shrugged off the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, but the falling rates of profit in the US sobered them. The NASDAQ high-tech bubble burst, and the less volatile New York Stock Exchange stagnated.

Production began to falter in fall 2000. The bourgeois optimists attributed the slowdown to an inventory correction: a temporary cut in production to bring down inventories. The capitalists themselves were more pessimistic. Recognizing that their problem was excess capacity, not just overproduction, they cut back investment. This makes it highly likely that the US economy, and with it the world economy, has begun a downward spiral into recession, with cutbacks in investment leading to cutbacks in consumption, leading to more cutbacks in investment.

The world economy has, overall, stagnated since the early 1970s, due to the fundamental disequilibrium of the world capitalist system. The imperialist countries have gained at the expense of the non-imperialist countries, and the capitalists and the upper-middle class have gained at the expense of the working class. This has tended to create an illusion of prosperity, especially in the US. But the “roaring nineties” in the US, like the “roaring twenties”, were built on sand. The developing recession should bring that home.

Bourgeois politics: A turn to the right

>From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s workers, blacks, Latinos, women, gays, and youth forced concessions from the US ruling class, including civil rights, affirmative action (quotas and other measures to help overcome the effects of discrimination), accessible birth control and legal abortion, medical insurance for retired and poor people, space to be openly gay, cultural and sexual freedom for youth, and an end to the Vietnam War, as well as the higher wages and benefits the capitalists had been conceding since the late 1940s.

The capitalists began a counteroffensive in the late 1970s, obscured by talk of “human rights” under Jimmy Carter and openly reactionary under Ronald Reagan. The whole spectrum of bourgeois politics shifted to the right. “New Democrats” like Clinton became almost indistinguishable from Republicans.

In the latter 1980s the capitalists decided that they could pursue their neoliberal agenda more effectively by appearing to be more conciliatory. George Bush Sr. promised “a kinder, gentler America”, and Clinton promised to help “the neglected middle class” through a national health insurance system and more resources for education. But Bush delivered the Gulf War, and Clinton delivered the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a so-called “welfare reform” eliminating programs for the poor dating to the 1930s, the “Effective Death Penalty Act” limiting the rights of condemned prisoners to appeal their cases, and the war against Yugoslavia.

The US ruling class was generally pleased with Clinton. But early in the 2000 election cycle they seemed to be backing George Bush Jr., donating so much money to his campaign that no other Republican had a chance. Bush was one of their own, a businessman, not a professional politician. In summer 2000 they became more even-handed in their contributions to the two parties, seeing how incompetent Bush was and how little public enthusiasm he was generating. Reagan had been as insubstantial as Bush, but at least he was an actor.

The 2000 elections were the most expensive in US history, costing an estimated $3 billion. Half the electorate didn't vote. The other half divided its votes almost evenly between the two capitalist parties.

Bush lost the popular vote by half a million but won the Electoral College when the US Supreme Court intervened to prevent a recount of the Florida vote and Al Gore conceded. The Republicans and the Democrats split the Senate 50:50 with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the deciding vote, until Jim Jeffords defected in May 2001 to give the Democrats control. The Republicans won a narrow majority of the House of Representatives (221 Republicans, 211 Democrats, 2 independents, and 1 vacancy). Very likely the Democrats will win a majority of the Senate and House in the 2002 elections.

The even division between voting and not voting and between the two capitalist parties showed that much of the electorate saw few important differences among the candidates. But some voters felt passionately about the elections and the results. The turnout of black voters was especially high, since African Americans knew that Bush would be marginally worse than Gore, and they were on the margin.

The Florida voting debacle brought home how many ways US elections are stolen, from the fact that only millionaires endorsed by billionaires have a chance to win higher offices to the details of voting lists and ballots. The presidential election was decided by the vote of five millionaires on the US Supreme Court and the decision of another millionaire to do his class duty and concede.

The Bush administration -- Bush surrounded by Cheney and other veterans of his father's administration -- has set a more conservative course than the Clinton administration's on taxes, the military, the environment, labor-law enforcement, civil rights, and other matters.

They have pushed through a relatively large tax cut (about 5 percent) favoring the wealthy. They are abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and other Cold War treaties in favor of a “go it alone” policy, including a national missile defense system. The US is not threatened with a missile attack and lacks the technology for an effective defense of civilians. The goal is not defense but intimidation, since no other country could even attempt such a system.

The difference between the Bush and Clinton administrations is more apparent than real, however. The Clinton administration bombed Iraq and Yugoslavia, developed “Plan Colombia”, and was ready to approve the national missile defense system as soon as it had a successful test. The Clinton administration reduced the Kyoto environmental accords to wishful thinking and said openly that the US would not abide by them.

Moreover, the Bush administration is limited by its lack of an electoral mandate, the evenly divided congress, and the opposition of most of the population to its more extreme military, economic, and social positions.

Working-class politics: A reawakening

Workers and youth have begun to reawaken politically since the mid-1990s, after a decade of ideological retreat and relative inactivity. The 1980s and early 1990s saw a few militant strikes, such as those at Hormel and Staley. These rank-and-file struggles inspired activists, but they were isolated and relatively easily defeated. The unions mostly made concessions, lost members, supported Democrats, and collected dues.

Activism among the oppressed and youth declined from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, although the abortion-clinic defense, lesbian/gay rights, and AIDS action movements of the late 1980s and the mobilization against the 1991 Gulf War showed that the potential for struggle never died.

By the mid-1990s workers were striking more often and more effectively. Even defeats, such as the 1995-97 Detroit newspaper strike, helped rally the working class, as workers began saying “We should have won that”, rather than “The situation was hopeless”. The 1997 UPS strike and 1998 GM Flint strike showed that big strikes with a high level of rank-and-file mobilization could win. Since then a wide range of workers have struck, from Los Angeles janitors to Boeing engineers.

The AFL-CIO has a new leadership from a younger generation of bureaucrats who see that the unions must organize or die. Some unions have organized more aggressively, and union membership has increased, although the proportion of the workforce in unions continues to decline. The unions have adopted more progressive positions, most notably on immigration, where the AFL-CIO's longstanding anti-immigrant policy was jettisoned as suicidal, since immigrants were eager to organize.

Youth have become more active too. Black youth and their communities have mobilized against police brutality and “the criminalization of a generation” and for affirmative action. Latino youth and their communities have mobilized for immigrant rights. White youth have supported these struggles and organized antiracist and antifascist movements of their own. The Klan and Nazis cannot rally anywhere in the US without large, often militant counterdemonstrations.

Students have organized on these issues and also against the Yugoslav war, the sanctions on Iraq, the Cuba embargo, and now Plan Colombia. Students have defended the environment and are taking up workplace issues, including “sweatshops” (non-union, low-wage garment and assembly plants in semicolonial countries) and “a living wage” (a requirement that employers contracting with cities and universities pay their workers a wage on which they can live).

The women's and lesbian/gay movements have been less active in the past few years than they were in the latter 1980s. But this is largely because they had succeeded in repelling attacks on abortion clinics, getting more resources to fight AIDS, and defending the lesbian and gay communities. These movements will become more active, as the turn to the right in bourgeois politics encourages renewed attacks.

The labor and youth components of the reawakening came together in the 1999 Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization. The workers brought their numbers, their social weight, and their class consciousness, and the students and other youth brought their rebelliousness and their social consciousness, including antiracism, internationalism, and environmentalism.

The combination was potent, helping to overcome the political weaknesses of both components: the tendency of the labor movement to narrow trade-unionism, protectionism and national chauvinism, and the tendency of the student and youth movements to elitism, symbolism, and individualism. A glaring weakness, however, was the relative lack of participation by blacks and Latinos.

The union bureaucrats worked assiduously in 2000 to prevent another Seattle. They carefully scheduled union demonstrations at the Republican and Democratic Party conventions at times and places away from the youth demonstrations. They urged the workers who had mobilized against Clinton in Seattle to vote for Democrats, including Gore. The Labor Party, dominated by the leaders of its endorsing unions, refused to run candidates.

The political reawakening, electorally thwarted by the union bureaucracy's support for the Democratic Party, expressed itself in the presidential campaign of Ralph Nader. Nader ran as a Green on a reformist program. But he was the only candidate with significant support to call for abolishing the Taft-Hartley anti-labor law, raising the minimum wage to $10 per hour, establishing a national health system, and restoring welfare benefits for the poor.

The only one to oppose the so-called war on drugs, the imprisonment of two million people, and the death penalty -- all of which disproportionately victimize blacks and Latinos -- and to support a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal. The only onne to support affirmative action, public funding for abortions, and partnership rights for lesbians and gay men.

The only one to call for an end to US aid to Israel and to sanctions against Iraq. The only one to call for a reduction (50 percent) in US military spending.

On this basis, Nader won 2.7 million votes, the most votes of any non-capitalist candidate in US history, although not as large a proportion of the electorate as Eugene Debs or Norman Thomas at their peak. His campaign was the first mass electoral break with the capitalist parties since before the Second World War.

Consciousness, organization, and leadership

The strikes and union organizing of the past six years, the revival of the student and youth movements, Seattle and subsequent mobilizations, and the Nader campaign show the potential for struggle. But this potential is largely blocked by the political confusion, organizational disarray, and class-collaborationist leadership of the workers' movement.

Most US workers regard themselves as “middle-class”, see no alternative to capitalism, and buy into national chauvinism and racist and sexist stereotyping to one degree or another. They see their lives too much in terms of competition and too little in terms of collective action. Only about 14 percent of workers are unionized, and the US has no substantial working-class parties.

The vanguard has a higher level of political consciousness, but most activists are skeptical of socialist organizations, if not of socialism. The combination of Stalinist betrayal and imperialist repression has virtually eliminated the word “communism” from their vocabulary. They are active in the struggle but are not trying to build a party or an International.

Many activists from the 1960s and 1970s were in socialist organizations. Some were in revolutionary organizations. They see these organizations as having failed and are unwilling to repeat the experience.

Many activists from the new generation regard themselves as “anarchists” and mean by this about what the older generation meant when they called themselves “the New Left” thirty years ago. They see the old left, that is, the socialist left as having failed. They see themselves as very modern, not realizing that their “post-Marxism” is really pre-Marxism.

The first decade of the twenty-first century is an exciting time to be a revolutionary Marxist in the US. The political reawakening of workers and youth creates new possibilities for political activity and intervention. But we are also acutely aware of how far we have to go before we can build a mass revolutionary workers' party in the US.

For now, we participate in struggles, help lead them where we can, explain how the immediate struggle fits into the general struggle against capitalism, and lay out the revolutionary socialist perspective.