'The times are bursting with potential'

by Gus Hall

This article was reprinted from the October 14, 1995 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

In a report to the Sept. 30 meeting of the national committee of the Communist Party, USA, National Chair Gus Hall said, "The times are busting with potential." Excerpts from his speech follow.

We meet in a moment of great flux, turbulence and fundamental change in many areas of life. It is a moment when millions of Americans are questioning some basic assumptions about their quality of life under our eroding capitalist system, when current developments are changing basic patterns of thought and stimulating action. These are times bursting with potential for the trade union movement, for the working class and our party.

It is a period when broad sections of our people, especially workers and their trade unions, are beginning to see the Republican-corporate attack on their standard of living and working conditions as a class war. They see the Contract on America as the most extreme form of this corporate war that aims to strip the American people of everything they have won since the 1930s. It is a racist war. It is a war against immigrants. It is a vicious attack on Chicano-Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Native American Indian and all nationally oppressed peoples and their communities.

Class war

Under the guise of "getting big government off the backs of the people," the rallying cry of the Republican right wing to shrink the government is a throwback to so-called "states' rights." It means going backwards to the right of states to re-segregate, discriminate and kill affirmative action programs. It means building more prisons, instead of feeding and housing destitute families.

In life, the Contract aims not only to eliminate all entitlement programs, but also to obliterate the very concept of the government as the "employer of last resort," when jobs in the private sector dry up because of corporate greed. The aim is a total regression to Reagan's, "the only business of government is business."

In just one week House committees voted to end federal entitlement for Medicaid, reduce the earned income tax credit, disassemble the Legal Services Corporation, cut Head Start, reduce funding for public broadcasting and the arts and launched an all-out attack on Medicare and Social Security.

It seems that almost every day now a bill is passed in one house or another, released from committee or introduced, that would take from the poor and give to the rich. Last week both the House and Senate completed a spending bill that will do to the environment what is being done to people's entitlements -- gut federal conservation and expand corporate logging, mining and ranching on public lands.

Monopoly capital sees privatization as a companion piece to ending entitlements. They are out to get the government totally out of the business of providing services and programs to the public -- like hospitals, schools, utilities, police and fire departments, sanitation, housing, prisons, child care and other social services.

Privatization and corruption go hand in hand. Privatization promotes corruption and corruption promotes privatization. Almost daily we see new examples of the corrupt, decaying side of state-monopoly capitalism.

Corruption, racism exposed

The O.J. Simpson trial has exposed not only the layers of corruption throughout the judicial system, but also the institutionalized racism, criminality and total corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department -- in fact, in most of our country's law enforcement and security agencies. Over the years they have become thoroughly infested with, and even headed by, virulent racists like ex-L.A. Police Chief Darryl Gates, who seek out and hire the most backward criminal thugs they can find.

Of course, the racially and nationally oppressed know only too well what the law enforcement agencies have become. But the Fuhrman tapes have forced the majority of Americans to face the open, racist nature of so many of our big city police departments.

Recent developments have also shown that the FBI and other outfits like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have organized, trained and deployed hundreds of secret, paramilitary vigilante groups that operate outside the law, protected by the law. They carry out raids, terrorize, maim and murder, then take the Fifth Amendment to protect themselves and cover up their crimes.

The raw, degenerate racism in the Fuhrman tapes is NOT fiction. It is the stark brutal reality in most police departments. Racism, lawlessness, violence and corruption go hand-in-hand.

Merger mania

Many of the new developments are history-making. Some of the specific processes and trends are changing the very nature of our system and the course of history. The recent corporate mega-mergers are of that quality. They are history-making in that they are now the mergers of giants.

Karl Marx said that the bigger capitalist fish would eat the smaller corporate fish. Today, it is the giant monopolies swallowing many big corporate fish that become global whales in a totally monopolized capitalist-imperialist society.

Today, the main process and economic direction is the mega- mergers of huge monopolies. Even Marx would have been surprised at the monopolization of whole areas like mass communications, high technology and banking. Many are mergers on a world scale.

For example, the Chase-Chemical merger created the biggest bank in the world and laid off 12,000 workers to start. In the near future it is predicted that half the nation's 59,000 bank branches will close and 450,000 of the 2.8 million jobs in the banking industry will disappear.

There is an epidemic of media mergers, deregulation and the giving away of federal licenses to operate on the public spectrum. ABC was sold to Disney for 19 billion; CBS to Westinghouse for 5.4 billion, as an example of the mega- media deals. Disney, Westinghouse, Time Warner-CNN and AT&T now dominate the whole mass communication and telecommunications field.

No one should be fooled by the AT&T plan to split into three companies. One of the main aims is to downsize plants, production and most of all employees. The immediate layoff will be 8,500, but AT&T won't say how many more of their 304,500 employees will get the ax.

These media monsters are using public airwaves, public property, to make huge private profits. Why shouldn't the federal treasury get a share of these huge profits to help fund not only progressive programming, but protect and expand government social services? We have to revive the question of eminent domain and stop the selling off of publicly owned resources.

There is also a merging trend in government, the courts and the Congress. There is now a fully-merged coalition of reactionary Republicans and some right-wing Democrats.

Together with a fully-monopolized corporate America, the Republican right, with some right-wing Democrats, is not only mounting coordinated attacks on the people, but also an effective attack on the Clinton Administration, which keeps responding by moving to the right.

There is a close relationship between economic developments and politics. In many ways the Republican actions in Congress facilitate and lay the basis for these massive mergers. The anti-trust concept and the regulations that attempted to put some brakes on the power and size of corporations has all but disappeared. Republican tax policies encourage and support the monopolization of industries. The only tax cuts in the Republican budget are for the monopolies. Thus, there are no longer any real obstacles to these mega-mergers -- just the opposite.

In many ways the mergers change the status and role of state monopoly capitalism. The state opens up ever new avenues for the monopolies to expand. The federal government is less and less a regulatory factor. The new mega-monopolies carry less and less of the tax load. They do what they please.

They can now open and close plants at will, across borders, get tax incentives wherever they go. NAFTA and GATT enormously expanded the ability of transnationals to move across borders to get away from better wages and working conditions, and, most of all, unions.

What's ahead?

The locked-out steelworkers in Ohio, the strikes in the Illinois "class war zone," the Detroit newspaper strike are symbolic of what lies ahead for the class struggle. In each case they are not only out to defeat the strike, but to smash the unions -- Reagan style.

In a lock-out situation like Warren, workers' minds are wide open. They are thinking in a class conscious way. The Warren workers are not just fighting for higher wages, but pensions and a successor clause that guarantees their union if the company sells. They are issues that go into the kind of future and retirement workers will have. Warren is a difficult struggle. It may be a long one.

There is a process of change and militancy taking place in the working class. The union mergers and the change in AFL- CIO leadership are the most important. Whether or not the labor movement sees the historic essence of this new level of unity, the monopoly corporations do. The ruling class sees much more than a labor federation election and some unions getting together.

In my mind, It is no accident that WCI Steel in Warren, Ohio was selected as the first line of attack. Of course, the right-wing atmosphere gave a green light. But WCI's brazen lockout is also a response to the leadership changes in labor, the mergers, our presence and message.

Think about it. Not too far into the future, WCI (if it still owns the Warren mill) will have to deal with the combined strength, power, resources and militancy of two million workers who can shut down not only steel plants, but whole industries like auto.

The merger trend in the trade union movement and the change in the top leadership of the AFL-CIO comes none to soon. It will enable the working class to take on the new mega- monopolies.

New forms of monopoly capitalism today call for a tighter structure in the trade union movement, a new kind of labor unity, on a bigger and broader scale. With closer unity between unions, between workers of different industries, there is greater potential for developing class consciousness.

We must keep working to build support for the Martinez and Dellums jobs bills. We must put out new leaflets that show where the money is and where we can take it from to create massive federal jobs programs that would rebuild the crumbling cities and infrastructure of our country.

With the new mood of anger, with mass movements and militant mass actions it is possible to make it impossible for Congress to turn the legislation they are working on into the law of the land. Whether Clinton, who promised "to end welfare as we know it" will use his veto powers is still a big question.

However, there is still somewhat of a consensus in labor that the danger from the ultra-right necessitates supporting Clinton. But, without mass pressure, without a Black-Brown- white united people's fightback movement, Clinton will NOT adopt progressive positions or policies. He will continue his rightward direction.

The Republican-Gingrich demolition crew is now actually destroying lives. From now on the elderly, the unemployed, students, homeless and children will have less. And, increasingly, more will have nothing.

This will change the nature of all struggles. The Communist Party's role and relationships to these struggles will also have to change. We have to become more directly involved in exposing the Republican reactionaries in Congress.

We have done some genuinely mass recruiting where people in large numbers, from all walks of life, from all around the country, are joining off the streets, off the campus, off the picket lines and even by letter and application by mail. The new members are also products of the economic and political changes that are taking place.

They see our Communist Party as a 75-year-old working class organization that fights the reactionary Contract on America and corporate America, that fights against the capitalist system, against racism, poverty and injustice. They see the Party as the organization that advocates Bill of Rights Socialism, USA.

They see our party as activists, initiators, leaders and participants. They see us as a revolutionary working class party of unity in action. This is the yardstick by which masses of people will join the Party and stay in the Party.