Class War Goes Full Throttle in US

The rich get richer the poor are screwed

By Patrick Martin

The ongoing mass protests in Wisconsin underscore the utter ruthlessness of the ruling class in its determination to drive down the living conditions of workers, not only in that state but throughout the United States.

The political reality that is ncovered up by the American media is the brazen and brutal use of power by an entire social class.

The privileged financial elite in the Us is prepared to use violence to achieve its ends. This kind of language is similar to what would have been used by Mubarak in Egypt or Gaddafi in Libya as they prepared a brutal crackdown.

The attacks on state workers aren't just a series of disconnected episodes, but as part of a broader struggle to crush the working class and turn back the clock by decades, in terms of their social rights.

This attack is being waged in states throughout the country, as well as by the federal government, under both Democratic and Republican Party leadership.

Workers must understand of the nature of the conflict they find themselves in. They face a ruling elite that has declared war.

While the ruling class is politically mobilized, with two parties working consciously to achieve its ends, workers have yet to build mass organizations capable of countering this attack and advancing the interests of the vast majority of the population.

American trade unions are incapable of defending themselves, let alone the working class. In Wisconsin, officials of the state employee and teachers’ unions openly embrace all the cuts demanded by Walker in the income, benefits and workplace rights of the workers.

They are balking only at those demands—ending the dues check-off and automatic union recognition—that threaten their own incomes.

Decades of labor-management collaboration, anti-Communism, and denial of the class struggle—in which the very term “working class” was banned and replaced by “middle class”—have separated the interests of the trade unions from those of the working class.

As the ruling elite is waging a ruthless struggle to defend its ill-gotten wealth, the unions are irreconcilably hostile to a socialist struggle based on the expropriation of the financial aristocracy and the coming to power of the working class.

Instead, they tie the working class politically to the Democratic Party, a big business party whose representatives, no less than the Republicans, defend the profits of the giant corporations and the wealth of the ultra-rich.

In state after state, Democratic governors are making the same demands on public employees as Walker in Wisconsin, only preferring to use the unions to help extract concessions from the workers.

Indeed, the Obama administration is one of the main agents of the financial aristocracy’s war on the workers. As his administration pours trillions into bank bailouts and bonuses for Wall Street executives, he adamantly refuses to help bankrupt state and local governments.

He is also imposing wage freezes on federal workers, while preparing a budget with hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts aimed overwhelmingly at working people.

Three years into the biggest crisis of the capitalist system since the Great Depression, the American political system has revealed its class character in the most brazen possible fashion.

The Democrats and Republicans rescue billionaires and corporations, while demonizing schoolteachers and street sweepers as “overpaid” and “privileged.”

For millions of working people, the events in Wisconsin are a wake-up call. The working class must recognize—as its enemies surely do—that it faces a serious and protracted struggle.

The conflicts in Wisconsin, and in other states and cities throughout the country, are not separate and isolated events, but part of an ongoing class war.