Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 43
October 28 – For many decades, in fact, for the almost two centuries that have elapsed since the great French Revolution, bourgeois historians and scholars have been seeking clues to understand the driving forces behind the inevitability of social revolution.
Even the most patently self-serving of these studies have had to come to the conclusion that wherever genuine, fundamental reform is blocked by the ruling class, social revolution is inevitable.
Of course, the causes are much deeper than that. Among other factors, they spring from the inability of the reigning, exploiting class to maintain its dominant position in its old, traditional way and the equal inability of the exploited and oppressed masses to submit to and endure new and harsher forms of domination and exploitation.
The rapid multiplication of the germs of such a development is clearly on the horizon and can be easily perceived if one carefully examines the so-called debate between the two nominees of the U.S. ruling class to administer its state in the coming period.
The [Carter-Reagan presidential campaign] debate only has importance because it was so carefully orchestrated, coordinated and supervised with such meticulous exactitude as to leave no room whatever for error. As one media commentator said, “There was absolutely no margin for error.”
The candidates came off precisely as the capitalist establishment wanted it. In this sense, it was as precise a representation of the state of mind and perspective of the ruling class as one could possibly make considering, of course, that it had to be made reasonably palatable to a disenchanted electorate, or that part of it which will participate in the elections.
What does it show?
It shows that the bourgeoisie is intent on renouncing, rejecting, and disqualifying, if not really vilifying, the period of economic, social, and political reforms which were ushered in on the heels of the Great Depression and successively improved upon to one degree or another over the succeeding decades.
The ruling class has now embarked upon its phase of the Counter-Reformation. It is, in a measure, akin to the European Counter-Reformation which was a feeble and unsuccessful effort to overcome the social and economic effects of the real Reformation which was ushered in by the rising bourgeoisie in its struggle against the feudal classes.
Should the U.S. ruling class seriously continue its counter-reform direction, it will sooner or later provoke that revolutionary working-class storm which the reforms initiated by the Roosevelt administration under the severe pressure of an objectively pre-revolutionary situation were calculated to forever submerge and disintegrate.
One of the true hallmarks of progress, successively pursued with each incoming administration, has been an increase in the minimum wage. This was really a paltry measure, but nonetheless a significant barometer of the continuing rising expectations of the masses and the willingness of the ruling class to accommodate itself to them. This debate shows for the first time that this policy is in the process of being reversed.
The issue, as it was ever so carefully and precisely gone over, was not how to increase the minimum wage as in the previous era but whether to abolish it (Reagan) or maintain it with many crippling exceptions (Carter).
All the manufacturers and all the workers who view the elections in dollars and cents cannot but attribute tremendous symptomatic significance to this. It represents a reversal from the entire preceding four-and-a-half decades of progressive increase in the minimum wage.
Again, there was the issue of Social Security, another very vital gain won in the period of successive concessions wrested from the capitalist class and one to which it has had to accommodate itself.
Always in the previous years, the issue was how much to increase the Social Security benefits. This time around, the issue was posed altogether differently. The debate in reality was whether to make Social Security voluntary. Reagan, of course, denied this, but his earlier open advocacy of such an extreme position, enabled Carter to advocate merely maintaining Social Security at a stationary level at a time of galloping inflation.
Almost as important was the new form in which the Social Security issue was posed. It was presented by a panel member as a war between the young and the old – the young workers bearing the burden of the older workers. Such a fraudulent posing of the question would have been inconceivable in an earlier era.
In the earlier days, when the struggle for Social Security was picking up steam and progressively being improved, the issue was not which section of the working class should bear the burden of Social Security (what a foul and virulent attempt to divide the workers!), but whether the ruling class or its capitalist government should assume the full burden of Social Security rather than taking it out of the pay of the workers.
This shift of the Social Security burden from the employers to the workers in an unfailing signal that ruling industrial and financial dynasties are intent on bringing about a real historic reversal of basic social, economic, and political concessions won by the working class and the oppressed in the past
Of equal significance was the failure of either candidate to even mention the phrase “full employment” which in previous elections struggles was a phrase appropriated by both parties of the ruling class and enshrined as a preamble to the Full Employment Act as enacted by law in 1946. This act supposedly made it mandatory for the government to not only encourage, but to promote full employment as a policy of the government.
To deliberately attempt to foster unemployment as a so-called tradeoff in the alleged fight against inflation, as Carter’s economic report to Congress in January did, was something neither party even remotely projected in the earlier era. Only a system in decline could require such barbaric methods as a method of revival.
On the decline of the cities and the incredible deterioration which all of them are being subjected to, the issue was no longer how much should be appropriated or what specific programs would be inaugurated but whether even to continue them (Carter) or openly dismantle them (Reagan).
Of course, carefully constructed phrases, gone over and over again by hordes of advisors and in reality implicitly approved by both sides, made it clear that neither candidate would get the edge on the other on the fundamental issues, except on the basis of earlier pronouncements which are really the basis upon which the bulk of the voting electorate can make their decision.
One of the most carefully constructed phrases concerned the use of military power. Knowing very well how fearful of unbridled militarism and war the mass of people are and how much they shun it, both Carter and Reagan all but became pacifists.
When Carter was obligated to mention that “in my State of the Union address earlier this year I pointed out that any threat to the stability or security of the Persian Gulf would be a threat to the security of our own country,” it was obvious to all who remembered the text of the saber-rattling speech that he made last January to a specially called joint session of Congress that he had omitted a significant phrase which, if it had been repeated, would have again conjured up the real picture of Carter as a warmonger.
In the original text Carter had said that in the event of a threat to the Persian Gulf he would use any means including the use of force. This is a very well-known speech which all the diplomats around the world who deal with the U.S. know, as do the correspondents who were questioning Carter during the debate.
Marvin Stone, who was questioning the candidates on this crucial issue, had the right, according to the rules laid down, to have a follow-up question such as, “Mr. President, you have omitted from your answer the phrase ‘using any means including the use of force,’ which was in your State of the Union address and widely publicized. Does that mean that you have ruled out the use of force in the current crisis?”
Of course, no such follow-up question was asked precisely because the whole thing was rigged. Nor are the other media commentators from the networks bringing it up, nor would it occur to Reagan to mention it as a flip-flop.
Such a question would be considered by the panel and the supposed combatants in the arena as a proper question only after the election, not on the eve when the masses of people are attuned to the issue of war and peace.
The whole line of questioning was replete with codewords which are understood by the masses in one way, as progressive, but the meaning of which the entire ruling class and the media know much better.
Thus Reagan’s earlier open advocacy of military superiority over the Soviet Union was carefully replaced by a new formulation of simply “re-negotiating a new treaty.” Of course, Carter also espoused military superiority over the Soviet Union in January of 1980 and gave a green light to an unprecedented military defense budget, which was all but forgotten and not referred to by anybody during the debate.
Speaking to an audience of tens of millions of people, the issue of military superiority over the USSR had to be carefully shielded from the masses in the same way that 20 years earlier the Nixon-Kennedy debate also camouflaged the real direction of U.S. foreign policy, only this time much more so. Then the debate was about the now long-forgotten islands of Quemoy and Matsu on the coast of China and whether holding them by military force was the appropriate peaceful measure.
The media panelists and the contenders all knew then, as they do now, that military intervention and not peace was the issue. For while the debate was going on, the Eisenhower administration was making plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and candidate Kennedy had been duly briefed on it, as was the media and the press corps. What in truth does the present administration have in preparation of which the candidates, the media, and of course the ruling class are well aware?
Because a dangerous situation is certainly in the process of developing as a result of the new get-tough policy of the Pentagon all over the world, a section of the ruling class, knowing full well that the capitalist establishment as a whole knows the war and domestic reaction orientation that Carter or Reagan will pursue, embarked upon a momentary flirtation with candidate Anderson as a third possibility.
Suddenly, there was this “spontaneous meteoric rise” in the candidacy of John Anderson, who had allegedly come up from behind. But its principle sponsor and sole significant financial benefactor was the house of Lehman Brothers, now called Kuhn, Loeb, Lehman Brothers, along with Lazard Freres which is intimately connected with the Lehmans.
The sponsors of Anderson were none other than George Ball of Lehman Brothers himself, the perennial outside liberal in Democratic administrations, as well as Felix Rohatyn, an investment banker and a newcomer in the political arena from Lazard Freres. But no sooner had the sponsorship been launched when, like a punctured balloon, it fell to the ground.
As Anderson himself woefully explained, the banks refused to advance the loans. The days when Lehman Brothers could bankroll liberals of the [Hubert] Humphrey type and charge off the small losses are gone. Continental Illinois, in Anderson’s home state, immediately followed suit. It was not, however, due to a fall in the polls, but a change in the traditionally liberal stance taken by Lehman Brothers-Lazard Freres.
It came in the form of an unpublicized, but significant addition to the senior advisory personnel of Lehman Brothers. The company had welcomed into its top echelon advisory group none other than former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, the well-known nuclear first-strike advocate. And as though to make sure that everyone in the financial community and elsewhere go the message, the Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed article by Schlesinger in which he was, of course, described as a senior advisor to Lehman Brothers and in which he excoriated present and past administrations for the woeful state of the U.S. military posture and made his usual call for a military buildup.
This was tantamount to hanging out a sign at Lehman Brothers announcing the end of its so-called liberal posture. It came almost simultaneously with an announcement by David Rockefeller of his new and even more far-right position which all but denounced his deceased brother Nelson for the lip-service he had given to the moribund liberalism of the old-line Republican moderates.
The bourgeoisie as a whole has been saying in so many words, “Look at the records. The deficit for the entire auto industry could be in excess of $4 billion merely for the first nine months of this year. Record losses for General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler cannot be made up by stock splits and various other exchanges of pieces of paper. It cannot be made up even by stock market manipulation or by government pump priming. Such profit losses can only be made up the way they have always been made up, through the only possible source – the hard labor of the working class.”
This explains, more than anything else, the historic reversal which the ruling class is trying to impose upon the working class by embarking on the road to reversing basic and fundamental concessions which the working class and oppressed have won in decades of struggle.
On this, both candidates are in full agreement. Their method differs slightly, but their objective is the same. Individual elements in the ruling class may have their preferences for either Reagan’s or Carter’s method. But what binds the ruling class together in approving both candidates is that Carter and Reagan share a common objective – reversing the previous era of rising expectations among the masses – and are both bent on solving the incurable economic crisis of the ruling class at home by expanding its adventurous role abroad.
A hundred years ago, Frederick Engels, the co-worker of Marx, writing in the still relatively progressive stage of capitalism, wrote that participation of the workers in bourgeois elections is an “index of the maturity of the working class” and of the progress it is making in educating itself for the day when it seizes power. Engels’ impeccably correct statement of his time cannot be wholly regarded as applicable in the circumstances of the imperialist epoch as it has evolved in the U.S. today.
The working class, as an independent class, which was what Engels was writing about, is totally excluded from the bourgeois political process. No avenue whatever has been left open for truly independent working-class participation in the U.S. as it has on the European arena and in Engels’ time. On the contrary, the manipulation of the electoral process by the bourgeoisie and the strangulation of virtually all independent forms of initiative and political participation is an index of the deterioration of the ruling class political system.
Engels’ analysis is of course applicable as it concerns the importance of the effort to break through the bourgeois political process by every conceivable method and utilize the bourgeois election, no matter how restrictive or narrow the opportunity may be, so long as it is not an effort to legitimize bourgeois, imperialist parliamentarism, but to undermine its political system in a revolutionary way by exposing it to the masses and educating them in the process.
Because so many working-class organizations in the post-Lenin era have once again fallen prey to the illusion that they can change the system by parliamentary means, as in Europe as well as here, it is all the more necessary not to abandon the political arena to bourgeois parties or their lackeys. On the contrary, it is imperative for the working-class vanguard party to unceasingly and energetically pursue the electoral arena as part and parcel of its overall activities in the class struggle, to promote class consciousness among the working class and the oppressed masses, and to prepare for the task of the revolutionary abolition of the rotting system of monopoly capitalism.
Last updated: 11 May 2026