The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.63/No.32           September 20, 1999 
 
 
Single Mothers, Sin Taxes Are Class Questions  

BY JACK BARNES
The following excerpts are from "Capitalism's Deadly World Disorder," a talk presented by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes to participants in a regional socialist educational conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, in April 1993. The selection appears under the heading, "All politics is class politics." The entire talk, with a question-and-answer period, is published in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. The book is copyright (c) 1999 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

Every time some politician pontificates about the "culture war," workers should remember it is really about justifying reactionary assaults on our rights and conditions on and off the job. It is about justifying the cop beatings of workers every night. It is about justifying assaults on women's rights. It is about dignity. It is about getting us to accept that since we are working people, we should expect a lesser standard of dignity than is accorded those who sanctimoniously preach to us about dignity. It is about getting us to accept being treated as commodities.

Labor's answer to the "culture war" must be to build a leadership capable of acting on the conviction that every time the capitalists say "we" - "we" Americans, "we" at General Motors, "we" family people, "we" who speak English - they are lying.

Every time the capitalists blame part of us for what they are trying to impose on all of us, they are trying to turn us against each other. They do not want us to be able to effectively fight them.

They want us to become the kind of people they say we should aspire to be. Beneath their moralizing pronouncements, the capitalists promote ever more reactionary, ever more antihuman attitudes in their drive to undermine social solidarity and crush the ability of the working class and our organizations to organize struggles and win.

That is why communists insist on looking at everything the employers and their government do as class questions. That is what lies behind all their policies. But the rulers do everything they can to stop us from recognizing politics as class questions.

They do all they can to stop us from acting politically as a class. They do not want us to think about each other as workers. They want us to think about each other as employed or unemployed, Black or white, "American" or immigrant, men or women, young or old. But we have to cut through the way they present things and explain the class realities they are covering up.

`Single mothers'
Politicians talk a lot these days about the "problem of single mothers," for example. But what about women in the capitalist class, or even the surviving remnants of the feudal aristocracy? Aren't they all single mothers? Isn't the queen of England a single mother? Such ruling-class women may or may not be connected with a husband through some legal, financial arrangement. That is irrelevant, however. Their husbands certainly do not build their lives around their families. Talk about "deadbeat dads"!

Men and women in the ruling class are very busy people; they have things to do. They have professions to engage in, hobbies to enjoy, money to make, governments to run, charities to organize, employees to keep an eye on. They hire people to raise their children. The children are raised very well. They are taught to read and write when they are very young. They receive good educations. They are given self-confidence and taught that they have an important place in the world.

So, women in the ruling class, and many upper-middle-class women too, are single mothers; the difference is in the economic and social arrangements these mothers have....

Whenever the capitalist politicians and their defenders seek to justify their reactionary policies, we have to go deeper to the class question behind every single one of them. Take the widely publicized protest organized in February by this new right-wing group "Lead or Leave" outside the American Association of Retired Persons headquarters, for example. When leaders of this self-proclaimed youth organization rail demagogically against the cost of Social Security, we have to explain that it is not "the elderly" they are attacking. It is an assault on a section of the working class - those who depend on Social Security. Many elderly people in this country have no need for Social Security and actually agree with Lead or Leave. The minute we reduce this to an attack on "the elderly" we begin losing the battle.

Vanguard workers want "the elderly" to have an equal opportunity to participate fully in social life as part of their lifetime of creating social wealth. We are for being generous to the "high net worth" elderly in this regard too. Ross Perot's demagogy about the "outrage" of billionaires like himself receiving Social Security checks is simply designed to soften up public opinion to begin unraveling retirement pensions as a social entitlement. The working class must fight for universal Social Security, regardless of class or income.

The trap of liberal `reforms'
Or take the attempt to use a "sin tax" as economic pressure. Clinton, for example, is putting an increased tax on cigarettes in his budget proposal to Congress. Think about what such taxes mean in class terms. One class can afford to pay the "sin tax" without even stopping to think about it. The other class is punished economically for buying certain things and then scolded by their inferiors in the bargain.

I believe that cigarettes cause cancer and do all kinds of harmful things to your health. But under a workers government, there will be not one penny of tax on cigarettes. Or on beer. That is the pledge of a workers government. Not one penny. If the workers movement is going to educate adults on the health effects of different habits, it has to do so without combining such education with differential economic punishments. That is the only road to free women and men remaking themselves.

The Clinton administration's national health care proposal is another example. It is all well and good for Hillary Clinton, the head of the White House health care task force, to say that everyone will stand in the same lines for limited medical resources and everything is going to be fair. Most workers would be ready to fight for the principle that if William or Hillary Clinton got on line as number five at a Health Maintenance Organization and somebody else got on line as number seven, one of the Clintons has a right to the prior appointment. But most workers also know this is not how it works in the real world, even if they do not explain it in clear class terms. Most workers know that the members of the entire class whose interests William Clinton represents do not have to stand on line, ever.

The truth is that the Clinton administration's so-called national health care program is a fraud. It is a way to further the class organization of medicine. It is a scheme to subsidize the ruling class and their giant insurance companies, HMOs, and other big businesses. It is the institutionalization of class differentiation in health care rationing in the name of "reform."(1)

Communist workers are also against what is broadly referred to as "prison reform." That, for sure, is a class question. We are for defending any con against any brutality or arbitrariness, and we are for prisoners taking as much space as they can get to break down the barriers that separate them from the rest of society and deprive them of their rights.

But we are against education being organized by the prisons. We are against therapy being organized by the prisons. Because anything organized through the prison system and imposed upon a con, even if supposedly "voluntary," is an attempt to control them, to break them, to make them complicit with the horrors of how prisons are organized and run under capitalism. It is a degrading reflection of the values and brutalities of declining bourgeois society.

Better alcoholic treatment programs, better sex offenders programs, better substance abuse programs, better job training programs for prisoners - these reforms are all designed to do the same thing as gangs in the prison yard and corruption in the cell blocks. Everything is organized to turn cons against one another, to reinforce the worst, dog-eat-dog values of bourgeois society, to differentiate the incarcerated.

The fight of the working class is the opposite. Not to organize anything through the prisons, but to break down every barrier we can between the life of prisoners and life beyond those walls.

None of these prison programs have anything to do with education or medical treatment. None have anything to do with raising the self-confidence and affirming the dignity of anyone. All are part of "owning up" to your own supposed inhumanity, instead of reaching beyond the bars to productive work and revolutionary activity as free men and women with dignity intact.

The expansion of supposedly voluntary sexual offenders programs in the prisons in recent years is part of the hysteria the rulers have had some success in whipping up around this question; it is one of the most effective pretexts they have found so far to justify pushing back democratic rights. These programs are of a piece with repressive laws like the one passed in Washington state three years ago allowing juries to indefinitely jail - and inflict "therapy" on - individuals convicted of violent sex crimes who have already served out their terms.(2)

1. In his January 1995 State of the Union address, Clinton dumped the proposed health care plan, saying his administration had bitten "Off more than we could chew." Meanwhile, the percentage of the U.S. population with no health insurance coverage increased to 16 percent in 1999 from 13.6 percent in 1990. The share of employed U.S. workers covered by employer-sponsored health plans has fallen by nearly 10 percent since the late 1980s, while more and more workers are being forced to pay an increasing share of the costs of job-linked insurance plans.

2. Although the Washington state law was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in August 1995 on grounds that it violated due process by punishing individuals twice for a single crime, a similar Kansas state law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1997. In May 1996 Clinton signed into law a federal statute making it mandatory for state governments to notify communities when a person previously convicted of a sex offense moves into a local neighborhood; the 1994 Federal Crime Bill had already required state and local authorities to register and track these persons for at least ten years. While neighbor notification provisions in several states have been ruled unconstitutional in federal court, the highest U.S. appeals courts to rule on the constitutionality of such laws upheld the New Jersey legislation (the so-called Megan's Law) and a similar law in New York in August 1997.  
 
 
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