The "big baby boom generation" is owed several trillion more than the next generation is obliged to pay in Social Security taxes, the big-business politicians and bourgeois economists cry. So something must be done, like privatizing the system, raising the retirement age, cutting cost-of- living raises, and increasing Social Security taxes. Their proposals are really probes to grind down workers' expectations of the right to a decent living after decades of toiling for a wage. Why don't Clinton and Congress cut interest payments to government bondholders to balance their budget, instead of slashing labor's flimsy safety net, workers can ask.

Working people shouldn't buy any of the bosses' schemes, which only break down human solidarity. For the wealthy class, workers who are elderly, disabled, or too young to labor are useless animals. When the capitalists rulers set the age requirements to draw Social Security benefits in the 1930s, they thought most workers would die before reaching the age of 65. Now their spokespeople are proposing to raise the age of eligibility to 67, since many more working people live a decade or more beyond retirement. Only a society run entirely in the interests of a tiny minority could call that a problem!

As their system continues its decay and their profits sink, the capitalists are driven to squeeze more and more out of workers - in the United States and every other capitalist nation. The new coalition government in New Zealand, for instance, is pushing to impose an additional 8 percent tax on workers' wages for a "compulsory savings" scheme that would replace the current retirement pension program. This comes on top of already deep attacks on workers' living standards and rights.

Workers and farmers produce all wealth in society, but under capitalism have no voice on how it is distributed. The portion of wealth called Social Security is part of the social wage won by the working class through decades of struggles. The bosses seek to put a greater share of this wealth into their pockets and eliminate any conception of social entitlements for working people.

The bosses know as they push us to the wall, social conditions become more volatile. So they step up their ideological campaigns to justify these attacks and attempt to confuse, demoralize, and isolate workers and youth who begin to resist. The employers also beef up their repressive apparatus to intimidate fighters. In New Zealand, the government granted cops more powers to spy on "criminals and gangs." The U.S. Social Security administration announced it was increasing the number of security guards at its offices across the country as the agency begins eliminating benefits - for 1 million legal immigrants and tens of thousands of disabled recipients in California alone.

The working class must resist the employers' offensive on our dignity and our moral right to these social entitlements. That's why it's important for the labor movement to fight to defend Social Security - not sit on government panels to dismantle it, as several union tops are doing today.

The capitalist rulers have no way out of their social crises and economic depressions short of a massive onslaught to lower the value of our labor power, in the process paving the way to armed conflicts to redivide the world among themselves. The defensive battles of the working class to defend itself against these assaults will lead to a struggle to replace the political rule of the capitalists with a workers and farmers government.  
 
 
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