A. ON THE FEATURES OF ADVANCED MONOPOLY CAPITALISM:

The Imperialist Economy

  1. The American economy, the center of the world imperialist system, is dominated by the monopoly sector, primarily based in production industries.
  2. Imperialism played a crucial role in post-World War 11expansion, providing raw materials and cheap labor from the Third World, and markets from the Third World and other capitalist states.
  3. Direct foreign investment, rather than trade, is now the major means of securing markets in foreign countries.
  4. The state now plays a major role in rationalizing the economy, providing new investment opportunities, and socializing indirect costs of production like education, health, transportation facilities.
  5. By organized violence, the state continues to serve ruling class interests against individual dissidents and, especially in times of crisis, organized insurgencies.
  6. The competitive sector, composed of services, retailers, small industry, building and real estate interests, small financial institutions, operates primarily on local and state levels.
  7. Financial institutions play a central part in providing investment funds and coordinating monopoly policies.

The divisions of labor

  1. Advanced capitalism increases the divisions of labor and the differentiation of the working class.
  2. High paid, skilled jobs are primarily in the monopoly sector and are the preserve primarily of white males.
  3. The weak position of the US labor movement led labor leaders to seek accomodation with capital; accomodation has only been feasible in the monopoly and, to a lesser extent, the state sectors.
  4. This accomodation has meant union acceptance of productivity increase, of management’s right to run the plant, and of the obligation to discipline members to keep the terms of the contract, in return for union recognition and wage gains tied to productivity and/or the cost of living.
  5. The state played a key role in fostering this accomodation, setting up the legal and institutional framework to facilitate it, and disciplining unions going beyond approved limits of militancy.
  6. The monopoly sector, especially, has intensified the minute divisions of labor in the work process, even within the same skill levels; it also sustains the sexual division of labor within the home by emphasizing women-as-consumers.
  7. Women and oppressed racial and national minorities are consigned primarily to lower levels of the state sector and monopoly enterprise, and to the competitive sector; their relative position has suffered from the displacement of inflation and tax burdens from the monopoly sector.

The social and cultural hegemony of the ruling class

  1. The ruling class has used the cultural media to infuse its values and assumptions throughout society. Education, for instance, transmits most information about the society, leaving those who would rebel without any coherent alternative understanding, fragmented and disorganized.
  2. Capitalist ideology reproduces fundamental archetypes of oppression: adult/child, man/woman, and adapts those archetypes to its needs–creating continuing models for master/servant relationships in all spheres of social existence.
  3. Capitalist ideology develops such archetypes to create modes of behavior which meet its needs: an obedient, repressed, individualistic labor force; a passive fragmented mass of consumers.
  4. The sanctity of property relationships builds upon the model of the family as property and the myth that defense of private ownership of the productive apparatus is necessary to defend the right to own necessities (e.g. houses, food, etc.)
  5. Capitalist ideology perpetuates the model of “democratic pluralism” as the only possible model for the political resolution of conflict. It maintains the cult of the expert-as-problem-solver, a mythology that mystifies and disorganizes conflict in the society.
  6. The ruling class has discrete agencies (media, foundations, business councils, etc.) that articulate, and implement its policies.
  7. The core of cultural integration in America has been the myth of affluence for those within the “American mainstream,” inseparably linked with the implied threat that “aliens”–especially the black colony–pose to the “common community.”

B. ON THE END OF THE AMERICAN ERA

The economic crisis: challenge to hegemony

  1. In the post-war period, US firms could exercise effective monopolies in the markets for which they competed or.which they sought to dominate. This period is at an end, due to inflation in the US and competition from modernized capitalist competitors.
  2. Third World natiorialist and revolutionary challenge has made control and defense of the empire increasingly costly.
  3. Persistent inflationary tendencies since World War 11 brought about in part by the increased employm~nt in the state sector (especially the military), have increased consumer buying power without increasing the supply of goods.
  4. The expansion of non-productive state employment has been necessary to stimulate; demand and absorb surplus labor (prevent depression and reduce unemployment) and to meet the military demands of maintaining the US world empire.
  5. The ability of unions in the monopoly sector to obtain cost-of-living gains beyond wages determined by productivity has aggravated this tendency to inflation and redistributed its effects within the working class to workers in the state and competitive sectors.

Structural unemployment

  1. The US economy persistently tends to high unemployment due to automation and other productivity measures in the monopoly sector; new jobs cannot be created in competitive and state sectors to absorb the growing job seekers.
  2. Women, racial minorities, youth, the old are placed at a disadvantage in the competition for scarce jobs.
  3. A number of institutions function to hold members of these groups out of the labor market, releasing them if labor grows scarce; these include the family, schools, the military, and compulsory retirement
  4. Educational requirements for jobs have risen out of proportion to needed skills; as more become educated, those already advantaged seek to raise requirements in order to preserve their labor market positions and those of their children.
  5. There is an increasing number of highly educated workers whose jobs require only a fraction of their skills and who have no prospect of better jobs.
  6. Increasing numbers of youth are leaving school and have only a tenuous connection with employment; drop-outs are the core of youth culture; their rejection of capitalist work and success ethics is attractive to many struggling with the frustrations of education and alienating jobs.

The political crisis

  1. The sixties witnessed the erosion of the poli- tical consensus of the post war period and growing self-consciousness of major blocs within the working class: e.g. racial and national minorities, women, youth, industrial and white collar workers.
  2. Programmatic and ideological links between diverse sectors of the working class have not yet been developed.

The political response

  1. The erosion of the political and economic hegemony of American imperialism creates major contradictions that threaten the agreement between labor and capital, generate structural imperatives for increased productivity and rationalization, and tend to freeze the labor position of minorities, women, and youth.
  2. The state plays a pivotal role in this crisis, assuming increased social and indirect costs of production (education, pollution clean-up, etc.), as it acts more and more directly to rationalize the economy. At the same time, the state sector experiences rising unionization of workers and, pressed to raise revenue from already rebellious middle-income tax payers, faces an acute fiscal crisis.
  3. The revolt of women and minorities generates continuing pressure for rationalization of the political • economy.
  4. In response to the crisis, liberal capitalism, rooted in the monopoly sector, hi,isformulated “reform” programs that seek rationalization of the economy, reallocation of state budgetary priorities, and a lowered profile abroad (stabilization of the Asian and European balance, renewed attention to primary .spheres of American influence and invest- ment–East Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, etc.). These programs assume and sustain conflicts of interest between sectors of the working class, assuming, for instance, that expanded state services, environmental cleanup, urban reconstruction, be paid for by middle income tax payers, or that expanded minority job opportunities come at the expense of white workers.
  5. Such programs contrast with the reactionary currents based on national industries and local interests, located in the competitive sector. Reactionary politicians capitalize upon the fears of large numbers of working people about the decay of order and play upon the divisions within the working population.

C. TOWARD A SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE

The New American Movement

  1. In the current context, NAM must offer an explicitly socialist alternative, both programmatic and theoretical, to ruling class reforms and reactionary programs. It can be neither a disciplined party nor a loose coalition but must combine elements of both.
  2. NAM must bring together diverse constituencies, experimenting with a variety of organizing efforts, and providing a medium for theoretical and practical exchange.
  3. NAM must also advance the process of left cohesion, offer an explicitly socialist alternative, and constantly politicize mass struggles.

Strategic criteria

  1. Any strategy based on one sector of the working class is inadequate for a revolutionary movement.
  2. The revolutionary goal is to unite now divided sectors and to break down divisions of social life: production/consumption, family/community, work/education.
  3. The dissolution of the agreement between capital and labor in the monopoly sector and the entrance of industrial workers into class-wide coalitions is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of a revolutionary movement.
  4. The developing consciousness of white collar and technical workers–that they are structurally oppressed by their relationship to the productive process is an essential component of an emerging revolutionary force. In the state and service sectors especially, such consciousness contains a demystification of the role of expert, a challenge to the structure and purpose of social services, and a growing awareness of the regressive mechanisms for financial support of service.
  5. The growing rebellion of women challenges both archetypes of cultural and psychological oppression and the role of women in the productive process as surplus and unpaid labor. The women s movement will retain a dimension of autonomy, even as it allies itself with the class as a whole.
  6. The emerging black (and third world) revolutionary movement represents a challen~e. to the racial division of labor, which has long divided and weakened the working class as a whole, and also signals an internationalization of struggle; like the women’s movement, it will continue to retain a cultural and political integrity within the emerging revolutionary class movement.
  7. The youth movement represents a fundamental critique of capitalist modes of consumption and work. Yet, based as it is on forces not integrated into the productive process, alone it will continue to be utopian and escapist, unable to mobilize the resources, galvanize a collective force, or develop a program for revolutionary transformation of that process.
  8. Mass sociaiist consciousness grows from struggles that unite diverse sectors of the working population and bring together now compartmentalized spheres of life in alliances around common programs that clarify class conflict and provide the basis for a vision of a total reconstruction of social relations.
  9. A revolutionary movement must sharpen class divisions by clarifying the material class interests of working people as a class, demanding that all reforms be paid for by redistribution of wealth from the ruling class (with special focus on the state policies like nature of expenditures, taxes, New Economic Policy).
  10. Such a movement must, in the context of class wide struggle, fight to end special oppression of women, third world people, youth, and the aged.
  11. Such a movement must clarify the quality of class struggle by demonstrating that the ruling class defines the character and ends of all institutional life –the work place, the school, social services, entertainment, etc. according to the imperatives of profit making.
  12. It must fiercely defend working class institutions and uncompromisingly support the right to self-determination for women and national minorities, and the right of workers to organize and strike.
  13. It must also take the initiative in struggle for expansion of existing areas, and the creation of new areas, of working class control: demanding, for instance, free child care and a variety of other services controlled by consumers and workers; demanding the training of workers and the reorganization of work to allow a variety of tasks and control over the productive process by workers themselves; demand ing schools serve the interests of workers, children, women, minorities, etc.
  14. In the context of such specific struggles communities of the oppressed can be created to articulate a revolutionary vision of work, service, recreation, family and community.
  15. Focus on state budgetary policies and administration can’ unite questions of distribution and control demonstrating the role of the state in transferring ‘wealth to the ruling cla~s and. in shaping services to fit the interests of profit-making.
  16. A revolutionary movement must be internationalist It must actively support the struggles of the oppressed everywhere (Vietnamese, South African, Northern Irish) as its own.