Today, profound forces are working to
undermine the social and economic equilibrium which has reigned
in the United States for more than 25 years, since the big
depressions of 1929–32 and of 1937–38. Some of these are forces
of an international character, linked with the national
liberation struggles of the peoples exploited by American
imperialism – above all the Vietnamese Revolution. But from the
point of view of Marxist method, it is important in the first
place to stress those forces which are at work inside the system
itself. This essay will attempt to isolate six of these forces –
six historic contradictions which are now destroying the social
equilibrium of the capitalist economy and bourgeois order of the
United States.
1. The Decline of Unskilled Labour and the
Social Roots of Black Radicalization
American society, like every other
industrialized capitalist country, is currently in the throes of
an accelerated process of technological change. The third
industrial revolution – summarized in the catchword ‘automation’
– has by now been transforming American industry for nearly two
decades. The changes which this new industrial revolution has
brought about in American society are manifold. During the
fifties, it created increased unemployment. The annual
growth-rate of productivity was higher than the annual
growth-rate of output, and as a result there was a tendency to
rising structural unemployment even in times of boom and
prosperity. Average annual unemployment reached 5,000,000 by the
end of the Republican administration.
Since the early sixties, the number of
unemployed has, however, been reduced somewhat (although
American unemployment statistics are very unreliable). It has
probably come down from an average of 5,000,000 to an average of
3,500,000 to 4,000,000: these figures refer to structural
unemployment, and not to the conjunctural unemployment which
occurs during periods of recession. But whatever may be the
causes of this temporary and relative decline in structural
unemployment, it is very significant that one sector of the
American population continues to be hit very hard by the
development of automation: the general category of unskilled
labour. Unskilled labour jobs are today rapidly disappearing in
US industry. They will in the future tend to disappear in the
economy altogether. In absolute figures, the number of unskilled
labour jobs in industry has come down from 13,000,000 to less
than 4,000,000, and probably to 3,000,000, within the last 10
years. This is a truly revolutionary process. Very rarely has
anything of the kind happened with such speed in the whole
history of capitalism. The group which has been hit hardest by
the disappearance of unskilled jobs is, of course, the black
population of the United States.
The rapid decline in the number of unskilled
jobs in American industry is the nexus which binds the growing
negro revolt, especially the revolt of negro youth, to the
general socio-economic framework of American capitalism. Of
course it is clear, as most observers have indicated, that the
acceleration of the negro revolt, and in particular the
radicalization of negro youth in the fifties and early sixties,
has been closely linked to the development of the colonial
revolution. The appearance of independent states in Black Africa,
the Cuban Revolution with its radical suppression of racial
discrimination, and the development of the Vietnam War, have
been powerful subjective and moral factors in accelerating the
Afro-American explosion in the USA. But we must not overlook the
objective stimuli which have grown out of the inner development
of American capitalism itself. The long post-war boom and the
explosive progress in agricultural productivity were the first
factors in the massive urbanization and proletarization of the
Afro-Americans: the Northern ghettoes grew by leaps and bounds.
Today, the average rate of unemployment among the black
population is double what it is among the white population, and
the average rate of unemployment among youth is double what it
is among adults, so that the average among the black youth is
nearly four times the general average in the country. Up to 15
or 20 per cent of young black workers are unemployed: this is a
percentage analogous to that of the Great Depression. It is
sufficient to look at these figures to understand the social and
material origin of the black revolt.
It is important to stress the very intimate
inter-relationship between this high rate of unemployment among
black youth and the generally scandalous state of education for
black people in the ghettoes. This school system produces a
large majority of drop-outs precisely at the moment when
unskilled jobs are fast disappearing. It is perfectly clear
under these conditions why black nationalists feel so strongly
about the problem of community control over black schools – a
problem which in New York and elsewhere has become a real
crystallizing point for the black liberation struggle.
2. The Social Roots of the Student Revolt
The third industrial revolution can be seen
at one and the same time as a process of expulsion of human
labour from traditional industry, and of tremendous influx of
industrial labour into all other fields of economic and social
activity. Whereas more and more people are replaced by machines
in industry, activities like agriculture, office administration,
public administration and even education become industrialized –
that is, more and more mechanized, streamlined and organized in
industrial forms.
This leads to very important social
consequences. These may be summed up by saying that, in the
framework of the third industrial revolution, manual labour is
expelled from production while intellectual labour is
reintroduced into the productive process on a gigantic scale. It
thereby becomes to an every-increasing degree alienated labour –
standardized, mechanized, and subjected to rigid rules and
regimentation, in exactly the same way that manual labour was in
the first and second industrial revolutions. This fact is very
closely linked with one of the most spectacular recent
developments in American society: the massive student revolt, or,
more correctly, the growing radicalization of students. To give
an indication of the scope of this transformation in American
society, it is enough to consider that the United States, which
at the beginning of this century was still essentially a country
exporting agricultural products, today contains fewer farmers
than students. There are today in the United States 6,000,000
students, and the number of farmers together with their
employees and family-help has sunk below 5,500,000. We are
confronted with a colossal transformation which upsets
traditional relations between social groups, expelling human
labour radically from certain fields of activity, but
reintroducing it on a larger scale and at a higher level of
qualification and skill in other fields.
If one looks at the destiny of the new
students, one can see another very important transformation,
related to the changes which automation and technological
progress have brought about in the American economy. Twenty or
thirty years ago, it was still true that the students were in
general either future capitalists, self-employed or agents of
capitalism. The majority of them became either doctors, lawyers,
architects, and so on or functionaries with managerial positions
in capitalist industry or the State. But today this pattern is
radically changed. It is obvious that there are not 6,000,000
jobs for capitalists in contemporary American society: neither
for capitalists or self-employed professionals, nor for agents
of capitalism. Thus a great number of present-day students are
not future capitalists at all, but future salary-earners, in
teaching, public administration and at various technical levels
in industry and the economy. Their status will be nearer that of
the industrial worker than that of management. For meanwhile, as
a result of automation, the difference of status between the
technician and the skilled worker is rapidly diminishing. US
society is moving towards a situation in which most of the
skilled workers for whom there remain jobs in industry will have
to have a higher or semi-higher education. Such a situation
already exists in certain industries even in countries other
than the United States – Japanese shipbuilding is a notorious
example.
The university explosion in the United States
has created the same intense consciousness of alienation among
students as that which is familiar in Western Europe today. This
is all the more revealing, in that the material reasons for
student revolt are much less evident in the United States than
in Europe. Overcrowding of lecture halls, paucity of student
lodgings, lack of cheap food in restaurants and other phenomena
of a similar kind play a comparatively small role in American
universities, whose material infrastructure is generally far
superior to anything that we know in Europe. Nevertheless, the
consciousness of alienation resulting from the capitalist form
of the university, from the bourgeois structure and function of
higher education and the authoritarian administration of it, has
become more and more widespread. It is a symptomatic reflection
of the changed social position of the students today in society.
American students are thus much more likely
to understand general social alienation, in other words to
become at least potentially anti-capitalist, than they were 10
or 15 years ago. Here the similarity with developments in
Western Europe is striking. As a rule, political mobilization on
the US campus started with aid to the black population within
the United States, or solidarity with liberation movements in
the Third World. The first political reaction of American
students was an anti-imperialist one. But the logic of
anti-imperialism has led the student movement to understand, at
least in part, the necessity of anticapitalist struggle, and to
develop a socialist consciousness which is today widespread in
radical student circles.
3. Automation, Technicians and the
Hierarchical Structure of the Factory
The progress of automation has also had
another financial and economic result, which we cannot yet see
clearly in Europe, but which has emerged as a marked tendency in
the United States during the sixties. Marxist theory explains
that one of the main special effects of automation and the
present technological revolution is a shortening of the
life-cycle of fixed capital. Machinery is now generally replaced
every four or five years, while it used to be replaced every ten
years in classical capitalism. Looking at the phenomenon from
the perspective of the operations of big corporations, this
means that there is occurring a shift of the centre of their
gravity away from problems of production towards problems of
reproduction.
The real bosses of the big corporations no
longer mainly discuss the problems of how to organize production:
that is left to lower-echelon levels of the hierarchy. The
specific objective in which they are interested is how to
organize and to ensure reproduction. In other words, what they
discuss is future plans: plans for replacing the existing
machinery, plans for financing that replacement, new fields and
locations for investment, and so on. This has given the
concentration of capital in the United States a new and
unforeseen twist. The process of amalgamation during the last
few years has not predominantly consisted in the creation of
monopolies in certain branches of industry, fusing together
automobile, copper or steel trusts, or aviation factories. It
has instead been a movement towards uniting apparently quite
unconnected companies, operating in completely heteroclite
fields of production. There are some classical examples of this
process, widely discussed in the American financial press, such
as the Xerox-CIT merger, the spectacular diversification of the
International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, or the
Ling-Temco-Vought empire, which recently bought up the Jones and
Loughlin Steel Corporation.
What this movement really reflects is the
growing pre-occupation with ‘pure’ problems of accumulation of
capital. That is to say, the imperative today is to assemble
enough capital and then to diversify the investment of that
capital in such a way as to minimize risks of structural or
conjunctural decline in this or that branch – risks which are
very great in periods of fast technological change. In other
words, the operation of the capitalist system in the United
States today shows in a very clear way what Marxists have always
said (and what only economists in the Soviet Union and some of
their associates in East European countries and elsewhere are
forgetting today), namely that real cost reduction and income
maximization is impossible if profitability is reckoned only at
plant level. In fact, it is a truth which every big American
corporation understands, that it is impossible to have maximum
profitability and economic rationality at plant level, and that
it is even impossible to achieve it at the level of a single
branch of industry. That is why the prevailing capitalist
tendency in the USA is to try to combine activities in a number
of branches of production. The type of financial empire which is
springing up as a result of this form of operation is a
fascinating object of study for Marxists.
But the more Big Capital is exclusively
pre-occupied with problems of capital accumulation and
reproduction, the more it leaves plant management and
organization of production to lower-echelon experts, and the
more the smooth running of the economy must clash with the
survival of private property and of the hierarchical structure
of the factory. The absentee factory-owners and money-juggling
financiers divorced from the productive process are not straw
men. They retain ultimate power – the power to open or to close
the plant, to shut it in one town and relaunch it 2,000 miles
away, to suppress by one stroke of their pens 20,000 jobs and 50
skills acquired at the price of long human efforts. This power
must seem more and more arbitrary and absolute in the eyes of
the true technicians who precisely do not wield the decisive
power, that of the owners of capital. The higher the level of
education and scientific knowledge of the average
worker-technician, the more obsolete must become the attempts of
both capitalists and managers to maintain the hierarchical and
authoritarian structure of the plant, which even contradicts the
logic of the latest techniques – the need for flexible
co-operation within the factory in the place of a rigid chain of
command.
4. The Erosion of Real Wage Increases
through Inflation
Since the beginning of the sixties and the
advent of the Kennedy Administration, structural unemployment
has gone down and the rate of growth of the American economy has
gone up. This shift has been generally associated with an
increased rate of inflation in the American economy. The
concrete origins and source of this inflation are to be located
not only in the huge military establishment – although, of
course, this is the main cause – but also in the vastly
increased indebtedness of the whole American society. Private
debt has accelerated very quickly; in the last 15 years it has
gone up from something like 65 per cent to something like 120
per cent of the internal national income of the country, and
this percentage is rising all the time. It passed the
$1,000,0000,000 (thousand billion) mark a few years ago, in
1966, and is continually rising at a quicker rate than the
national income itself. The specific price behaviour of the
monopolistic and oligopolistic corporations, of course,
interlocks with this inflationary process.
This is not the place to explore the
technical problems of inflation. But it should be emphasized
that the result of these inflationary tendencies, combined with
the Vietnam war, has been that, for the first time for over
three decades the growth of the real disposable income of the
American working class has stopped. The highest point of that
disposable real income was reached towards the end of 1965 and
the beginning of 1966. Since then it has been going down. The
downturn has been very slow – probably less than 1 per cent per
annum. Nevertheless it is a significant break in a tendency
which has continued practically without interruption for the
last 35 years. This downturn in the real income of the workers
has been the result of two processes: on the one hand inflation,
and on the other a steep increase in taxation since the
beginning of the Vietnamese war. There is a very clear and
concrete relation between this halt in the rise of the American
working class’s real income, and the growing impatience which
exists today in American working class circles with the US
Establishment as such, whose distorted reflection was partly to
be seen in the Wallace movement.
It is, of course, impossible to speak at this
stage of any political opposition on the part of the American
working class to the capitalist system as such. But if American
workers accepted more or less easily and normally the
integration of their trade union leadership into the Democratic
Party during the long period which started with the Roosevelt
Administration, this acceptance was a product of the fact that
their real income and material conditions, especially their
social security, improved during that period. Today that period
seems to be coming to an end. The current stagnation of
proletarian real income means that the integration of the trade
union bureaucracy into the bourgeois Democratic Party is now no
longer accepted quite so easily as it was even four years ago.
This was evident during the Presidential Election campaign of
1968. The UAW leadership organized their usual special
convention to give formal endorsement to the Democratic
candidates, Humphrey and Muskie. This time they got a real
shock. Of the thousand delegates who normally come to these
conventions, nearly one half did not show up at all. They no
longer supported the Democratic Party with enthusiasm. They had
lost any sense of identification with the Johnson Administration.
All the talk about welfare legislation, social security,
medicare and the other advantages which the workers had gained
during the last four years was largely neutralized in their eyes
by the results of inflation and of increased taxation on their
incomes. The fact was that their real wages had stopped growing
and were even starting to decline a little.
It is well known that dollar inflation in the
United States has created major tensions in the world monetary
system. Inside the USA, there is now a debate among different
circles of the ruling class, the political personnel of the
bourgeoisie, and the official economic experts, as to whether to
give priority to restoring the US balance of payments, or to
maintaining the present rate of growth. These two goals seem to
be incompatible. Each attempt to stifle inflation completely, to
re-establish a very stable currency, can only be ensured by
deflationary policies which create unemployment – and probably
unemployment on a considerable scale. Each attempt to create
full employment and to quicken the rate of growth inevitably
increases inflation and with it the general loss of power of the
currency. This is the dilemma which confronts the new Republican
administration today as it confronted Johnson yesterday. It is
impossible to predict what course Nixon will choose, but it is
quite possible that his economic policy will be closer to that
of the Eisenhower Administration than to that of the
Kennedy-Johnson Administrations.
A group of leading American businessmen, who
form a council of business advisors with semi-official standing,
published a study two weeks before the November 1968 election
which created a sensation in financial circles. They stated
bluntly that in order to combat inflation, at least 6 per cent
unemployment was needed. These American business-men are far
more outspoken than their British counterparts, who are already
happy when there is talk about 3 per cent unemployment.
Unemployment of 6 per cent in the United States means about
5,000,000 permanently without work. It is a high figure compared
to the present level, to the level under ‘normal’ conditions,
outside of recessions. If Nixon should move in that direction,
in which the international bankers would like to push him, the
American bourgeoisie will encounter increased difficulty in
keeping the trade-union movement quiescent and ensuring that the
American workers continue to accept the integration of their
union bureaucracy into the system, passively submitting to both
bosses and union bureaucrats.
5. The Social Consequences of Public
Squalor
There is a further consequence of inflation
which will have a growing impact on the American economy and
especially on social relations in the United States. Inflation
greatly intensifies the contradiction between ‘private affluence’
and ‘public squalor’. This contradiction has been highlighted by
liberal economists like Galbraith, and is today very striking
for a European visiting the United States. The extent to which
the public services in that rich country have broken down is, in
fact, astonishing. The huge budget has still not proved capable
of maintaining a minimum standard of normally functioning public
services. In late 1968, the New York Times Magazine, criticizing
the American postal services, revealed that the average letter
travels between Washington and New York more slowly today that
it did a hundred years ago on horseback in the West. In a city
like New York street sweeping has almost entirely disappeared.
Thoroughfares are generally filthy: in the poorer districts,
streets are hardly ever cleaned. In the richer districts, the
burgers achieve clean streets only because they pay private
workers out of their own pockets to sweep the streets and keep
them in more or less normal conditions. Perhaps the most
extraordinary phenomenon, at any rate for the European, is that
of certain big cities in the South-West, like Houston or Phoenix,
which have half a million inhabitants or more and yet do not
have any public transport system whatsoever: not a broken-down
system – just no system at all. There are private cars and
nothing else – no buses, no trams, no subways, nothing.
The contradiction between private affluence
and public squalor has generally been studied from the point of
view of the consumer, and of the penalties or inconveniences
that it imposes on the average citizen. But there is another
dimension to this contradiction which will become more and more
important in the years to come. This is its impact on what one
could call the ‘producers’, that is to say of the people who are
employed by public administration.
The number of these employees is increasing
very rapidly. Public administration is already the largest
single source of employment in the United States, employing over
11,000,000 wage earners. The various strata into which these
11,000,000 can be divided are all chronically underpaid. They
have an average income which is lower than the income of the
equivalent positions in private industry. This is not
exceptional; similar phenomena have existed or exist in many
European countries. But the results – results which have often
been seen in Europe during the last 10 or 15 years – are now for
the first time appearing on a large scale in the United States.
Public employees, who in the past were
outside the trade-union movement and indeed any form of
organized social activity, are today becoming radicalized at
least at the union level. They are organizing, they are
agitating, and they are demanding incomes at least similar to
those which they could get in private industry. In a country
like the United States, with the imperial position it occupies
on a world scale, the vulnerability of the social system to any
increase in tradeunion radicalism by public employees is very
great. A small example will do as illustration. In New York
recently both police and firemen were, not officially but
effectively, on strike – at the same time. They merely worked to
rule, and thereby disorganized the whole urban life of the city.
Everything broke down. In fact, for six days total traffic chaos
reigned in New York. Drivers could park their cars anywhere
without them being towed away. (Under normal conditions, between
two and three thousand cars are towed away by the police each
day in New York.) For those six days, with motorists free to
park where they liked, the town became completely blocked after
an hour of morning traffic – just because the police wanted a 10
per cent rise in wages.
The economic rationale of this problem needs
to be understood. It is very important not to see it simply as
an example of mistaken policy on the part of public
administrators or capitalist politicians, but rather as the
expression of basic tendencies of the capitalist system. One of
the main trends of the last 25 or 30 years of European
capitalism has been the growing socialization of all indirect
costs of production. This constitutes a very direct contribution
to the realization of private profit and to the accumulation of
capital. Capitalists increasingly want the State to pay not only
for electrical cables and roads, but also for research,
development, education, and social insurance. But once this
tendency towards the socialization of indirect costs of
production get under way, it is obvious that the corporations
will not accept large increases in taxation to finance it. If
they were to pay the taxes needed to cover all these costs,
there would in fact be no ‘socialization’. They would continue
to pay for them privately, but instead of doing so directly they
would pay indirectly through their taxes (and pay for the
administration of these payments too). Instead of lessening the
burden, such a solution would in fact increase it. So there is
an inevitable institutionalized resistance of the corporations
and of the capitalist class to increasing taxes up to the point
where they would make possible a functional public service
capable of satisfying the needs of the entire population. For
this reason, it is probable that the gap between the wages of
public employees and those of private workers in the United
States will remain, and that the trend towards radicalization of
public employees – both increased unionization and even possibly
political radicalization – will continue.
Moreover, it is not without importance that a
great number of university students enter public administration
– both graduates and socalled drop-outs. Even today, if we look
at the last four or five years, many young people who were
student leaders or militants three or four years ago are now to
be found teaching in the schools or working in municipal social
services. They may lose part of their radical consciousness when
they take jobs; that is the hope not only of their parents but
also of the capitalist class. But the evidence shows that at
least part of their political consciousness is preserved, and
that there occurs a certain infiltration of radicalism from the
student sector into the teaching body – especially in higher
education – and into the various strata of public administration
in which ex-students become employed.
6. The Impact of Foreign Competition
The way in which certain objective
contradictions within the United States economy have been slowly
tending to transform the subjective consciousness of different
groups of the country’s population – negroes, especially negro
youth; students; technicians; public employees – has now been
indicated. Inflation has begun to disaffect growing sections of
the working class. But the final, and most important, moment of
a Marxist analysis of US imperial society today has not yet been
reached – that is the threat to American capitalism now posed by
international competition.
Traditionally, American workers have always
enjoyed much higher real wages than European workers. The
historical causes for this phenomenon are well known. They are
linked with the shortage of labour in the United States, which
was originally a largely empty country. Traditionally, American
capitalist industry was able to absorb these higher wages
because it was practically isolated from international
competition. Very few European manufactured goods reached the
United States, and United States industry exported only a small
part of its output. Over the last 40 years, of course, the
situation has slowly changed. American industry has become ever
more integrated into the world market. It participates
increasingly in international competition, both because it
exports more and because the American domestic market is rapidly
itself becoming the principal sector of the world market, since
the exports of all other capitalist countries to the United
States have been growing rapidly. Here a major paradox seems to
arise. How can American workers earn real wages which are
between two and three times higher than real wages in Western
Europe, and between four and five times higher than real wages
in Japan, while American industry is involved in international
competition?
The answer is, of course, evident. These
higher wages have been possible because United States industry
has operated on a much higher level of productivity than
European or Japanese industry. It has enjoyed a productivity
gap, or as Engels said of British industry in the 19th century,
a productivity monopoly on the world market. This productivity
monopoly is a function of two factors: higher technology, and
economy of scale – that is a much larger dimension of the
average factory or firm. Today, both of these two causes of the
productivity gap are threatened. The technological advance over
Japan or Western Europe which has characterized American
imperialism is now disappearing very rapidly. The very trend of
massive capital export to the other imperialist countries which
distinguishes American imperialism, and the very nature of the
so-called ‘multi-national’ corporation (which in nine cases out
of ten is in reality an American corporation), diffuses American
technology on a world scale, thus equalizing technological
levels at least among the imperialist countries. At the same
time, it tends, of course, to increase the gap between the
imperialist and the semi-colonial countries. Today, one can say
that only in a few special fields such as computers and aircraft
does American industry still enjoy a real technological
advantage over its European and Japanese competitors. But these
two sectors, although they may be very important for the future,
are not decisive for the total export and import market either
in Europe or in the United States, nor will they be decisive for
the next 10 or 20 years. So this advantage is a little less
important than certain European analysts have claimed.
If one looks at other sectors, in which the
technological advantage is disappearing or has disappeared –
such as steel, automobiles, electrical appliances, textiles,
furniture, or certain types of machinery – it is evident that a
massive invasion of the American market by foreign products is
taking place. In steel, something between 15 and 20 per cent of
American consumption is today imported from Japan and Western
Europe. The Japanese are beginning to dominate the West Coast
steel market, and the Europeans to take a large slice of the
East Coast market. It is only in the Mid-West, which is still
the major industrial region of the United States, that imported
steel is not widely used. But with the opening of the St.
Lawrence seaway, even there the issue may be doubtful in the
future. Meanwhile, automobiles are imported into the United
States today at a rate which represents 10–15 per cent of total
annual consumption. This proportion too could very quickly go up
to 20–25 per cent. There is a similar development in furniture,
textiles, transistor radios and portable television sets;
shipbuilding and electrical appliances might be next.
So far, the gradual disappearance of the
productivity differential has created increased competition for
American capitalism in its own home market. Its foreign markets
are seriously threatened or disappearing in certain fields like
automobiles and steel. This, of course, is only the first phase.
If the concentration of European and Japanese industry starts to
create units which operate on the same scale as American units,
with the same dimensions as American coporations, then American
industry will ultimately find itself in an impossible position.
It will then have to pay three times higher wages, with the same
productivity as the Europeans or the Japanese. That would be an
absolutely untenable situation, and it would be the beginning of
a huge structural crisis for American industry.
Two examples should suffice to show that this
is not a completely fantastic perspective. The last merger in
the Japanese steel industry created a Japanese corporation
producing 22,000,000 tons of steel a year. In the United States,
this would make it the second biggest steel firm. On the other
hand, in Europe the recent announcement that Fiat and Citroen
are to merge by 1970 has created an automobile corporation
producing 2,000,000 cars a year; this would make it the third
largest American automobile firm, and it would move up into
second place, overtaking Ford, if the momentum of its rate of
growth, compared with the current rate of growth in the American
industry, were maintained for another three or four years.
These examples make it clear that it is
possible for European and Japanese firms, if the existing
process of capital concentration continues, to attain not only a
comparable technology but also comparable scale to that of the
top American firms. When they reach that level, American workers’
wages are certain to be attacked, because it is not possible in
the capitalist world to produce with the same productivity as
rivals abroad and yet pay workers at home two or three times
higher wages.
7. The Wage Differentials Enjoyed by
American Workers
The American ruling class is becoming
increasingly aware that the huge wage differential which it
still grants its workers is a handicap in international
competition. Although this handicap has not yet become a serious
fetter, American capitalists have already begun to react to it
in various ways over the past few years.
The export of capital is precisely designed
to counteract this wage differential. The American automobile
trusts have been investing almost exclusively in foreign
countries, where they enjoy lower wages and can therefore far
more easily maintain their share of the world market, with cars
produced cheaply in Britain or Germany, rather than for higher
wages inside the United States. Another attempt to keep down the
growth of real wages was the type of incomes policy advocated by
the Kennedy and Johnson administrations – until 1966, when it
broke down as a result of the Vietnam war. A third form of
counteraction has been an intensification of the exploitation of
labour – in particular a speed-up in big industry which has
produced a structural transformation of the American working
class in certain fields. This speed-up has led to a work rhythm
that is so fast that the average adult worker is virtually
incapable of keeping it up for long. This has radically lowered
the age structure in certain industries, such as automobiles or
steel. Today, since it is increasingly difficult to stay in
plants (under conditions of speed-up) for 10 years without
becoming a nervous or physical wreck, up to 40 per cent of the
automobile workers of the United States are young workers.
Moreover, the influx of black workers in large-scale industry
has been tremendous as a result of the same phenomenon, since
they are physically more resistant. Today, there are percentages
of 35, 40 or 45 per cent black workers in some of the key
automobile factories. In Ford’s famous River Rouge plant, there
are over 40 per cent black workers; in the Dodge automobile
plant in Detroit, there are over 50 per cent. These are still
exceptional cases – although there are also some steel plants
with over 50 per cent black workers. But the average employment
of black workers in United States industry as a whole is far
higher than the demographic average of 10 per cent: it is
something like 30 per cent.
None of these policies has so far had much
effect. However, if the historic moment arrives when the
productivity gap between American and West European and Japanese
industry is closed, American capitalism will have absolutely no
choice but to launch a far more ruthless attack on the real wage
levels of American workers than has occurred hitherto in Western
Europe, in the various countries where a small wage differential
existed (Italy, France, West Germany, England and Belgium, at
different moments during the sixties). Since the wage
differential between Europe and America is not a matter of 5,
10, or 15 per cent, as it is between different Western European
countries, but is of the order of 200-300 per cent, it is easy
to imagine what an enormous handicap this will become when
productivity becomes comparable, and how massive the reactions
of American capitalism will then be.
It is necessary to stress these facts in
order to adopt a Marxist, in other words a materialist and not
an idealist approach to the question of the attitudes of the
American working class towards American society. It is true that
there is a very close inter-relation between the anticommunism
of the Establishment, the arms expediture which makes possible a
high level of employment, the international role of American
imperialism, the surplus profits which the latter gets from its
international investments of capital, and the military apparatus
which defends these investments. But one thing must be
understood. The American workers go along with this whole system,
not in the first place because they are intoxicated by the ideas
of anti-communism. They go along with it because it has been
capable of delivering the goods to them over the last 30 years.
The system has been capable of giving them higher wages and a
higher degree of social security. It is this fact which has
determined their acceptance of anti-communism, and not the
acceptance of anti-communism which has determined social
stability. Once the system becomes less and less able to deliver
the goods, a completely new situation will occur in the United
States.
Trade-union consciousness is not only
negative. Or, to formulate this more dialectically, trade-union
consciousness is in and by itself socially neutral. It is
neither reactionary nor revolutionary. It becomes reactionary
when the system is capable of satisfying trade-union demands. It
creates a major revolutionary potential once the system is no
longer capable of satisfying basic trade-union demands. Such a
transformation of American society under the impact of the
international competition of capital is today knocking at the
door of US capitalism.
The liberation struggles of the peoples of
the Third World, with their threat to American imperialist
investment, will also play an important role in ending the long
socio-economic equilibrium of American capitalism. But they do
not involve such dramatic and immediate economic consequences as
the international competition of capital could have, if the
productivity gap were filled.
As long as socialism or revolution are only
ideals preached by militants because of their own convictions
and consciousness, their social impact is inevitably limited.
But when the ideas of revolutionary socialism are able to unite
faith, confidence and consciousness with the immediate material
interest of a social class in revolt – the working class, then
their potential becomes literally explosive. In that sense, the
political radicalization of the working class, and therewith
socialism, will become a practical proposition in the United
States within the next 10 or 15 years, under the combined impact
of all these forces which have been examined here. After the
black workers, the young workers, the students, the technicians
and the public employees, the mass of the American workers will
put the struggle for socialism on the immediate historical
agenda in the United States. The road to revolution will then be
open. |