Two days later, thousands of mine workers and their supporters, mobilized by the United Mine Workers union, rallied in Washington to demand Congress guarantee lifetime health coverage for retirees and widows. The outcome of this battle affects wide areas of the country.

Bush presented Social Security as a pension plan where "young" and "productive" people "pay" for the "retired," obscuring the class questions involved. His proposal points away from government-guaranteed old-age pensions and medical coverage, and income and health care for disabled people and dependents of workers who are disabled or who die, and supplemental income for workers who earn very little. His attack is not against the "elderly" but against the entire working class.

Vice president Albert Gore, while condemning Bush's proposals, maintained the same framework of the debate and the notion that the Social Security system will go bankrupt by mid-century.

As its name implies, Social Security is a social conquest, conceded by the super-wealthy ruling class in face of the rising industrial union movement in the 1930s, and later expanded as a result of the victories in the civil rights movement and the battles for Black liberation in the 1950s and early 1960s. The goal is to prevent the bosses from tearing the working class apart, imposing horrendous conditions on sections of the laboring classes, and counting as expendable the years before and after they are able to draw profits from the labor of men and women in factories, mines, and mills.

The goal of the working class must be to ensure that social security comes out of the current production by a class, for a class. It is a fight by the labor movement to establish social rights for all, not individual money-management investment schemes to hope for some sort of retirement.

The aim must be to bring all welfare payments, all medical claims, all supplemental payments for education and child care into a comprehensive, nationwide, government-protected entitlement.

The labor movement needs to fight to extend the miners' approach to the entire working class and integrate it into Social Security. The mine workers' demands point toward social rights that should be universal, never held hostage to profit demands or partisan politics, and assured to all, young and old.

In the book Capitalism's World Disorder, Jack Barnes extensively addresses the stakes in this battle for the working class. He points out that workers "should never present today's crisis of the propertied classes and their social system as primarily an economic crisis. No, it is the great political and moral crisis of our time. It is proof that only the working class has a chance to resolve this crisis and begin transforming society in a truly human way. Because only the working class, the propertyless class, has no interest in turning like dogs on any of the victims of the crisis-ridden capitalist system.

"That is why the battle for jobs, the battle for solidarity, the battle against racism and the oppression of women, the battle against immigrant-bashing, the battle for social protection--why all of these are a battle for the life and death of the labor movement. They are the battle for the time and space to prepare a socialist revolution! That is what is at stake in pulling the working class together."  
 
 
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