BY JACK BARNES  
We're at a turning point of a certain kind in working-class politics in the United States.

Communist workers recognized several years ago that a decade-long retreat of our class was bottoming out and that we had entered a period of renewed resistance by workers and farmers. It's not primarily that for the first time in quite a while we are seeing a few more victories in strikes and organizing drives, which we are. But even in the still-more-typical struggles that end in standoffs with the bosses, we are finding groups of workers who remain ready for a fight, who are reaching out to extend support to other struggles, who are open to new and radical ideas about the root causes of the economic and social ills facing working people and to broadening views of solidarity.

The pace of the manifestations of this sea change in the class struggle, of course, goes through ebbs and flows. Resistance speeds up and broadens for a while, and then slows down. The unions, the sole mass institutions of the American labor movement today, continue to weaken. The traditions promoted by the union officialdom--a product of their bourgeois outlook and values, and their petty-bourgeois conditions of life--leave them utterly unready for what can suddenly erupt under the current crises-ridden conditions of world capitalism. Above all they are unprepared for the struggles building up underneath, not to mention frightened by that prospect. They, too, can never understand the capacities of the ranks.

For most of the past decade, we heard more and more from the big-business press and capitalist politicians about the "new economy." The new era capitalism had entered, we were told, was fueled by a computer-driven "productivity miracle." Growing numbers of bourgeois spokespeople went so far as to suggest that recessions and business cycles were a thing of the past.

Today, however, a few more facts are coming out that confirm what communist workers have been explaining all along.

First, to the degree there's been an increase over the past decade in what the bourgeoisie measures as labor productivity--and it's far from the ballyhooed "miracle"--the source has not been computers and the Internet. The bosses have boosted their profit margins by cutting real wages and benefits, speeding up production, lengthening the workweek, increasing part-time and temporary labor, and reducing government-funded social security programs. And because of the misleadership of the labor movement, the employing class has largely been able to get away with it.

Second, the long upturn in the business cycle during the 1990s--and it was long by capitalist standards, going on ten years--was not based on a historic acceleration of capacity-expanding capital investment. It was not based on drawing more and more workers into plants, mines, and mills and massively increasing the production of salable goods. It was not based, in short, on a major expansion of social wealth. Instead, the long upturn was the product of a giant speculative bubble, an enormous mountain of debt.  
 
Ballooning stock market valuation
While stock prices as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for example, rose 225 percent between 1994 and the Dow's high point in January 2000 (and that's staid compared to the more than 500 percent increase in the high-tech-heavy NASDAQ stock index over that same period), the Gross Domestic Product of the United States rose only a little more than 25 percent and corporate profits around 65 percent. In fact, while the total market value of all stocks issued in the United States as measured by their share prices had never risen much above 75 percent of GDP in the twentieth century (and then only on the eve of the 1929 crash that ushered in the Great Depression), it shot up to 175 percent of GDP in the late 1990s.

As for debt levels, corporate indebtedness exploded in the latter half of the 1990s. It was fueled in part by a spate of multibillion-dollar mergers that substantially increased the concentration of capital in the United States even further. Debt levels surpassed those reached even during the borrowing binge of the 1980s, which in turn had helped set the stage for the 1987 stock market crash. Last year alone corporate debt shot up by nearly half a trillion dollars.

And personal debt has rocketed to record levels, as most of us know concretely from our co-workers, family members, friends, and credit card bills.

Layoffs, too, have begun to climb sharply since the end of last year. So too the number of workers filing claims for unemployment benefits. The flip side of the employers' drive to maintain low, "just-in-time inventories" has been an increase in the volatility of the demand for labor--including an explosive growth of temporary jobs, or what some big-business writers and economists callously label "just-in-time labor."

So, the vulnerability of world capitalism to sudden and destabilizing shocks is being confirmed, despite the bourgeois triumphalism of much of the 1990s. A further deepening of the farm crisis, a spread of the California power breakdown, the bankruptcy of another debt-wracked Wall Street "hedge fund" that holds the big banks in bondage, a financial collapse beginning in Argentina or Indonesia, a plunge in the dollar's value, a rash of bank failures stemming from these or other jolts--these are just a few of the myriad possible developments that can plunge workers and farmers in the United States and other imperialist countries into a deepening social and economic crisis.  
 
Uneven impact of crisis in Third World
Throughout Africa and much of Latin America and Asia, of course, hundreds of millions are already facing a downward-spiraling catastrophe, and have been for almost two decades. Even in the most devastated areas of the semicolonial world, a tiny handful of privileged families have prospered, however, as well as a larger middle class and pockets of toilers in various countries. What's more, the effects of the capitalist crisis have been very uneven and polarized, giving rise to the illusion in certain parts of Latin America and particularly Asia (the "Tigers") that applications remain open to join the club of industrially advanced capitalist nations. But the workings of the market system, and the class structure it unrelentingly reproduces and reinforces worldwide, are once again confirming what Lenin explained to workers and farmers on the eve of the Russian Revolution in his booklet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism--that by the opening of the twentieth century the doors to that exclusive club had been slammed shut once and for all.

The current officialdom of the labor movement in the United States seek to avert their eyes from these realities. To prepare for battle means you might end up having to fight one, and that's exactly the unsettling prospect union bureaucrats fear most. They have no intention of doing so.

But the explosive mixture building up in the United States is being enriched by the ongoing shift in the composition of the working class in this country. Immigration is changing the face of the working population in virtually every imperialist country except Japan. But nowhere to the same degree as right here. Nowhere.

In search of inexpensive labor, U.S. finance capital continues to draw in toilers driven off the land and left without jobs or livelihoods throughout the Third World. It draws in workers who are determined to take advantage of its relatively higher wages to support families and get a grubstake. Over the past half decade, the United States has taken in roughly half of all emigrants to the imperialist countries--one half! The U.S. rulers know that these massive labor inflows are essential to the "productivity miracle" and profit drive that are central to further widening their edge over capitalist rivals in Germany, France, Japan, and elsewhere in Europe and Asia.

As a result of this immigration, New York City has grown by nearly 10 percent in as many years, and Chicago and several other cities that had declined in population over the half century since World War II increased in size during the 1990s. Nearly 11 percent of the U.S. population today is foreign-born, and the percentage of immigrants in the ranks of the working class is substantially higher than that.

At the opening of the twenty-first century, the United States is the only country in the imperialist world whose rate of population growth is increasing not declining; it is also the imperialist country in which the median age is rising most slowly.

The American working class is getting younger. And the implications of that fact for prospects to transform the labor movement and build a revolutionary proletarian party are a pleasure to behold.

What it means to be an "American worker" today is changing. The experience and traditions--and image--of the working class and labor movement in the United States are being enriched by the diverse cultures and lessons of struggles by workers and peasants from Latin America and the Caribbean, from Asia and the Pacific, from Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. In the course of common struggles, and through growing recognition that solidarity is essential, these workers are finding ways to communicate with each other. They are finding ways to work, and more and more often to fight, shoulder to shoulder.  
 
Party reflects changing class
Most important, the communist movement in the United States--through the mix of workplaces and unions where we find jobs; through the workers districts where we locate our halls and bookstores; through our regular Militant Labor Forums; through our efforts to produce and sell periodicals, books, and pamphlets in both English and Spanish, and as much as possible in French--is beginning to find more and more ways for the activity, composition, and leadership of the revolutionary party to reflect this changing American working class.

Some of you may recall that in the late 1980s supporters of Pathfinder Press organized artists from around the world to paint a six-story mural on the side of its building. The large banner across the bottom of that mural declared, in English, Spanish, and French: "For a world without borders. Por un mundo sin fronteras. Pour un monde sans frontières." Among other things, that slogan was connected to a number of struggles we were involved in at the time to prevent the U.S. government from deporting several fighters back into the hands of cops and jailers in Mexico, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. And we always pointed out that while a world without borders is impossible to achieve under capitalism, the fight for that goal is an essential part of mobilizing the class forces to overturn that brutal and oppressive social system in country after country worldwide.

This transformation of the working class in the United States and other imperialist countries is irreversible. The capitalists can pull 'em in, but they can't push 'em out.

Toilers impressed into debt slavery by domestic exploiters and imperialism in their countries of birth are pouring into this country and becoming wage slaves. For the U.S. ruling families, that process is a more and more indispensable engine of capital accumulation. As they inflate more and bigger balloons of debt worldwide in hopes of counteracting capitalist overproduction and clearing world markets, those who are the hardest-hit victims of indebtedness are joining other gravediggers of the imperialist global order right here in its strongest bastion.

Class-conscious workers glory in these historic changes. We glory in these reinforcement brigades coming to the aid of our class, refreshing the heterogeneity and richness of the labor movement. The historic wave of immigration transforms the proletarian movement in the United States into something more and more recognizable as the class that will overthrow capitalism.  
 
 
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