This article was reprinted from the February 1, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.
(Gus Hall is national chair of the Communist Party USA. The following is excerpted from a report to the Communist Party's national committee meeting in New York Jan. 25.)
Change - both positive and negative - has been the dominant element in many areas of life since our last national committee meeting in June 1996. For the Communist Party it was a year of positive events and developments that are solid building blocks to build on for the coming year.
Our membership has grown. The Party is more active in mass forms of struggle. The overall influence and prestige and image of the party has greatly improved, including in the mass media and the Internet.
The Party's relations with the trade union movement and other mass organizations are closer and stronger. Perhaps most important, the majority of the Party is now actively involved in struggles, especially in strikes, strike solidarity, mass demonstrations, people's coalitions, alliances and movements.
In these struggles Communists are winning the respect and trust of not only local unions and trade union leaders, but also working class communities where we worked in broad coalitions to defeat the ultra-right.
Our mass recruiting shows we are on the threshold of building a mass party, of redefining the concept of our party as a mass, revolutionary party and making the changes this necessitates.
We are now in a position to consider running some serious Communist candidates in local and state races in the 1998 elections. We are ready to run candidates and win races because we have a larger support base, a larger constituency, a much larger party.
The Party is also stronger in the area of theory and ideology. We are an ideologically and philosophically united, Marxist-Leninist party, with a high-level, theoretically grounded leadership. So the Party can now expand on the positive building blocks of the past year.
We have been saying that nothing is the same as before the elections. All political forces, organizations and movements have changed as a result of the struggles around the elections. With struggle and change comes changing patterns of thought.
To a great extent, the positive results of the elections were a direct consequence of the profound changes in the trade union movement. As well, the people's movements, especially the African American, Latino and women's movements, went through a qualitative change during the electoral struggles.
These forces were instrumental in blunting the aims of the ultra-right and fascist fringe. Together with labor, they foiled their attempt to take over all three branches of government and continue, unrestrained, implementing the killer Contract on America.
As a class, working people are going through the greatest changes in perhaps 20-25 years. They are more anti-monopoly, anti-corporate and anti-establishment than ever before. Millions now see themselves as victims of a system that has betrayed their deepest needs and desires for a better life.
Thus, working class patterns of thinking are going through radical changes, what we have been calling a "radicalization process."
The new trade union movement is a result of this process. The changed relations between the Party, the trade unions, working class communities and mass organizations are a part of this process.
Radicalization has shaped new negative attitudes about capitalism as a system and about its two old parties. It has resulted in working people actively searching for radically new solutions.
And it has directly resulted in people finding those solutions in the politics and ideology of our Party, in people finding their political home in our party.
Perhaps more than ever we have to develop a guide to action for a period that is profoundly different, a new time when all conditions and forces are changing.
At the same time, monopoly capital has NOT changed its basic orientation: To destroy the trade unions, all social programs and entitlements by using every weapon in its formidable arsenal to force the working class, poor and oppressed to carry the full weight of its multiple crises.
In its drive to accelerate monopolization, the main instrument is a whole array of schemes to privatize everything that is still publicly owned or controlled, to turn everything over to private ownership and maximum corporate profits.
In the government, Gingrich is their main man. That is why the ruling class went all- out, even incurring the wrath of popular sentiment, to save him. Because he is their creature. Even as "damaged goods" he will do their corporate bidding, with relish, and force his political operatives to do the same.
The words "Contract with America" have all but disappeared from their public speeches. But its essence is still the main topic in the smoke-filled rooms. They have not given up the Contract. The tactics will change, become more subtle, more stealth. But the goals will not. Thus, the struggle continues in a new stage.
There is a new level of corporate-monopoly domination of the government. To see this clearly all we have to do is look at what the new Clinton government looks like so far.
Many of the old Clinton cabinet members have already left government service and returned to serve monopoly, the big corporations they originally came from four years ago.
While in the Clinton Cabinet they served the same corporate masters they now go back to serve directly, only their salaries will be much bigger.
The new members of the president's cabinet are going to be servants of some of the same corporations as the outgoing members.
These politicians not only represent big business in general. They represent specific sections, specific interests and specific corporations of monopoly capital.
For example, the foreign policy and military decisions are made based on how they affect the profits of specific corporations like Boeing, (which just swallowed up McDonnell Douglas.)
State-monopoly-capital has become an ever more powerful force. There are very few big corporations that do not have some business relationships with the government by way of special government contracts. This has made government contracts, government-related political posts key to monopoly profits.
State-monopoly-capital is continuing to tighten its monopoly control in every area of life. Monopoly control starts with ever tighter control of industrial production. The process of the bigger swallowing the smaller is accelerating. Mergers are still rampant in just about every area.
Karl Marx's prediction becomes ever truer as specific lines of capitalist production are controlled by one or two corporations.
For example, the mass media is now under total monopoly control. With the development of advanced computer technology there is a growing monopoly control of the flow of information. Every phase of our culture is now under monopoly control.
There is a growing monopoly control of all medical institutions, which includes hospitals, clinics, research facilities and a whole system of Health Management Organizations (HMOs).
Higher education is increasingly controlled by monopoly. And public education is threatened with privatization, vouchers and "charter schools." This monopolization has taken hold in just about every area of life.
Mergers and acquisitions in 1996 doubled the number in the biggest year of the merger-mania 80s. Increasing corporate concentration leads to increasing conglomerization of the economy on a world scale.
The WFTU report said that while the sales of the top 200 transnationals is equal to more than a quarter of the world's economic activity, their combined global employment is only 18.8 million, less than 1 percent of the world's work force.
The report says, "The top five firms have more than 30 percent of global sales in airlines, aerospace, steel, oil, personal computers, chemicals, and the media." And, "Overall, Corporate profits have jumped 75 percent from 1990 to 1995."
Ironically, unions had to fight for some 10 years to win a $4.50 minimum wage, while General Electric tries to cover up the fact that last year it made profits that amount to a million dollars an hour, for every hour of the year.
Globalization is a method of transnational corporate domination of whole economies and countries to milk them of human and natural resources through severe exploitation, low wages, unbearable, anti-union working conditions and 17th century child labor.
International corporations break strikes by using plants located throughout the world to maintain productive capacity and fill orders.
The process of monopolization has been going on for some one hundred years. This process has been the vehicle not only for the bigger corporations to take over the smaller, but also the weaker ones.
Monopolization has been used to overcome some serious problems that arose under capitalism. But this is now coming to an end because increasingly in many areas there are no more smaller or weaker corporations left to take over. This creates a whole new and very serious problem for monopoly capital. And for the working class.
In one industry after another, what is left after mega- mergers, acquisitions and takeovers, bank and corporate mergers is one or two mega-corporations.
The main vehicle for increasing monopolization is privatization. The drive to privatize includes education, hospitals, schools, prisons, sanitation, public transportation, postal services, social services, welfare, Social Security, etc.
The privatization process is changing the role of the state under state-monopoly capitalism. The state loses any semblance of independence. The state becomes increasingly a profit-making vehicle for the corporations.
In all of this, the struggle over what is left of state control, public and cooperative ownership becomes more important.
However, privatization faces the same eventual kind of dead end. True, there is still some room for continued privatizing, but not much. For example, in the prison system so far 65,000 prisoners out of 1,500,000 are in privatized prisons.
There is still some room for privatization of hospitals, public education, social and public services like welfare, transit, parks, sanitation. And, of course, globalization makes more room for further privatization. But that will also come to a dead end in the not too distant future.
There are other processes which are contributing to new crises. Corporate policies of downsizing, of closing plants and mass layoffs, the policy of moving towards a contingent workforce continue unabated.
Add the exodus of whole industries to more profitable locations, massively destroying jobs and communities, the rapidly declining consumer buying power (overproduction), falling wages and new industrial technology that increasingly replaces human labor.
And we must add the over $4 trillion government and private debt. We have to include the crisis of no new reinvestment in plants, machinery and technology.
Add to all these, the crisis of our country's infrastructure, our cities and environment and the deteriorating overall quality of living. The combination of complicated old and new contradictions are fast becoming unresolvable.
All these eventually unresolvable dead-end processes are presenting a new set of problems for the working class and trade unions. The new problems call for radical changes in the structure and organization of the trade unions, including international solidarity.
It is clear that the class struggle will become more sharp and more direct. Thus, the general, systemic crisis of capitalism deepens, with a combination of some old and new conditions.
To alleviate the crisis, monopoly capital could have chosen the path of concessions: increase entitlements, welfare and social services; pass an emergency public works jobs bill; make necessary capital investments and transfer some excessive wealth from the filthy rich to the jobless and poor.
True to its nature and following its natural instincts, state monopoly capital did just the opposite. It chose the path of the so-called "Gingrich revolution" and the Contract on America.
Under the guise of "balancing the budget" the real goal is to continue shrinking the government and turn over more and more control of the state to monopoly, to abolish the very concept of government responsibility for public welfare, continue deregulation, eliminate democratic and workers' rights and increasingly merge the interests of state with monopoly capital and corporate profits. In this way, corporate America thinks it can stop the decay of capitalism.
It is correct to ask: how will capitalism survive monopolization, globalization, privatization, downsizing, technology-replacing human hands and million dollar an hour corporate profits? That is what corporate America, capitalism and the class struggle are going to face in the near future. Thus, the working class and its unions face not only new issues, but new kinds of issues.
There is a growing, expanding anti-monopoly sentiment. The majority of working and poor people recognize the monopoly corporations as evil, greedy and responsible for their unemployment, insecurity, poverty and inequality.
But this majority anti-monopoly sentiment is not yet a politicized, organized force. However, the necessary key ingredient, the labor movement, is now positioned to organize and lead this anti-corporate sentiment.
Watch for Part II: The Working Class and the New Labor Movement
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