CLASS WARFARE IN THE 80'S AND 90'S
REAGONOMICS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
INTRODUCTION: Class warfare in the rich capitalist
countries is increasing in scope and intensity. This renewed class struggle comes as a
result of irreversible changes in the world capitalist system. In the U.S., the capitalist
class is winning. All of the measures of class struggle are on the rise. In the past
twenty years,wealth has become more concentrated. The the top one percent held 25.4
percent of the wealth of the nation. Today they hold 35.1 per cent (AP: 26 Jul 86). In the
five years of the Reagan administration, the middle class has lost l5 % of its social
base. Four per cent have moved up while 11% have fallen into genteel poverty. The IRS
reports that the number of families reporting over $50,000 dollars income per year has
tripled since 1980 (USA Today: 17 April, 86). At the same time Department of Labor
statistics report a doubling of the number of people below the poverty line since 1980
(Washington Post: 13 May 86). Adjusted for inflation, real take home wages have declined
14.3% since 1973 (AP: 31 July 86).
In Britain and Europe, as in many poor capitalist countries, similar class warfare is
being waged. Class warfare in capitalist societies is registered as social problems in the
politics of the capitalist state as well as in academic textbooks. Generally, European
states do much better providing social justice programs to ameliorate the effects of class
struggle (Dolbeare: 68). In those states, workers' unions are much larger as a proportion
of the population and much more active politically (Magaziner and Reich: 78)
Compared to Sweden, Japan, W. Germany, Italy, France, the U.K. and Canada, the U.S. is at
or near the bottom on most measures of social justice: disemployment rates, job security,
public welfare expenditures, paid vacations, life expectancy at birth, infant mortality
rates, pollution controls, homicide deaths, inequality of income (Magaziner and Reich: 14
ff).
While many social problems predate capitalism and many will continue after capitalism no
longer exists, capitalism as a mode of production creates vast new problems and
exacerbates ancient ones in the 120 poor capitalist and semicapitalist countries. In the
20 or so rich capitalist countries, while the record is very uneven, I think it fair to
say that capitalism has been progressive on a number of counts. It tends to destroy those
ancient structures of privilege: gender, racial, national and ethnic chauvinism. In
another place, we have argued that capitalism as a world system needs and works for peace
(Young and Young, 1986:20) It may be an unjust peace in which the flow of food, profits,
and raw materials go from the poorest, hungriest countries in the world to the richest,
but it is oriented to human emancipation and peace in a variety of ways.
However, the major problems of the day; poverty, disemployment, inequality, health
problems, warfare, pollution, crime, and fascism are connected to the logics of life in
capitalist societies. These are the direct manifestation of class warfare within and
between societies. Racism, sexual violence, prostitution, commodity narcotics, child
neglect and abuse are less directly tied to the logics of capitalist production and
distribution but nevertheless are greatly affected negatively by this system.
Several changes have dramatically altered that which has been conceived as a social
problem and how solutions are to be conceived. We will review these changes briefly and go
into a discussion of why the Reagan administration must now realign the state in the U.S.
on the side of the capitalist class ending progressive politics in America. It is not that
Mr. Reagan is an evil, insensitive president . . . the logics of capitalism require that
he reverse the progress in dealing with social problems in the United States. Capitalism
forced the state into the quest for social justice and now it pushes the state out of that
quest. Here's why.
THE NATIONALIZATION OF SOCIAL JUSTICE: In the U.S.A., the
politics of social problems began to be national in scope as corporate markets in
industry, commerce, banking and finance and communication became national. As the unit of
production and distribution changed from the family farm to the local, national then
multinational corporation, the location of social politics transcended family boundaries
also. In parallel fashion, the location of social justice problematics moved from the
family to the larger church group, to the community, to the county and to the state.
By the 1930's the locus of concern for poverty, shelter, clothing and child welfare had
focussed in county units (Brents, 1984). The events of the 30's; depression, demographic
changes, industrial, commercial and communication changes, relocated the politics of
social justice from the county to the national arena. The election of Roosevelt was
central to this transformation of the locus of social justice concerns.
In the late forties, a "grand compromise" between elements of the working class
and the diffuse capitalist class achieved stability, prosperity, job security for some
3040 percent of the working class. This historic compromise in the U.S. was built upon
several elements. First and basic to that compromise was the strategically advantageous
position of the U.S. industrial machine in the world capitalist system. Virtually alone of
the major industrial capitalist states, the U.S. survived the war intact. The U.S. quickly
claimed world markets and raw materials from Third World countries in the capitalist bloc.
The supply of labor in the U.S. was adequate as Veterans, women and Blacks were
incorporated into the post war economy. Not least was a series of workers' strikes after
WWII which threatened to stop production and profit during those rebuilding years.
By the 1960's the Federal stage was clearly the arena within which the struggle over what
would be called a social problem and in which response would be adopted. There were
several progressive movements which forced the politics of social justice into National
politics: the most important were the struggles of the various labor organizations. The
various civil rights movements; black, women's, and the aged all called forth progressive
legislation as the Johnson administration tried to win popular support after the death of
Kennedy.
Labor struggles of the 20's, 30's and 50's were very important to politicizing social
problems and hence social justice policies. Countless workingclass men and women, unable
to get adequate wages, safe working conditions, control over the labor process joined
together in an uneven, poorly organized and fragmented but nonetheless class struggle to
politicize the economics of life in the U.S.A.
In the 20's, 30's, 60's and 70's senior citizens waxed and waned as a political force
through which concern for hunger, housing, medical care and dignity was expressed and
advanced. Women joined together in local, state and weak national organizations to open up
the structure of opportunity in technical and professional occupationsto resist
harassment at work, to get resources for children and dependent children as well as parity
in wage labor.
In the 50's and 60's, Black people became a more coherent force in the quest for a good
and decent society. Perhaps Martin Luther King was the most visible figure in that
movement. For a while, until the political murder of M. L. King, Blacks forced legislation
congenial to social justice concerns.
The women's movements forced progressive change in the 60's and 70's as well. There were
four kinds of these movements: the most important of which was bourgeois liberalism; the
prototype of which was, perhaps, Gloria Steinam. They were interested more in private
career opportunities than in the wider issues of social justice. There developed a more
visible radical feminist movement who advocated complete separation from the world of men.
They began to build separate if not equal social institutions: business, recreational,
religious, familial, and social. The traditional feminist movement, embodied by the
activism of Phyllis Schafly argued for a stronger family system in which women were to
gain honor and dignity by their role in the home as competent wife and mother. The
smallest by far was the socialist feminist movement restricted, largely, to academia. They
advocated a wide reaching transformation of the structures of oppression: gender, racial,
class and national hubris.
While often at odds with the traditional feminist movement, still the various coalitions
of women's' groups made progress in the status of women...at least until the advent of the
Reagan administration.
Students and sectors of the surplus population politicized social justice at the national
level. The loosely coordinated student power movement, the antiwar movement and the poor
peoples' marches combined to push the capitalist state to give some attention to social
justice.
The politicization of social problems and social justice at the national level also
correlated with other changes in the mode of production. As production, jobs, and
resources move out of the family household and into the factory; as ownership of the means
of production shift from the tribe or the kinship unit; as family ownership transformed
into stock ownership by anonymous others; as distribution changed from family relations to
market relations, the source and solutions to social problems changed as well. When
ownership of the means of production of necessities is in the hands of private, intensely
personal, intensely social units, then supply and access to necessities is made available
to each person as a matter of right rather than profit. One can claim food, shelter and
other resources on the basis of social status rather than upon disposable income. As class
relations arise, new problems of production and distribution are created and move into the
public sphere.
There has been a long, slow processional shift of such distribution problems from the
private sphere to the public largely because capitalists tend to separate more and more
people from both production (in order to cut wage costs) and from distribution (in order
to sell at the highest price possible). Private problems become public issues when the
sources of problems become external to the family unit and cannot be solved within the
structure of the extended family.
Capitalism created the state to assert its own rights but democratic states have a
legitimacy problem and must deal with questions of jobs, hunger, housing, health care,
transport, recreation or face massive resistance and rebellion. In a capitalist economy,
the democratic state can respond to demands for social justice only if it has the revenue
resources with which to purchase from the capitalist class the necessities for an
evergrowing surplus population. As we shall see, the fiscal crisis of the world
capitalist system raises legitimacy questions which cannot be solved in the public sphere
through progressive politics. The funds are no longer there. The Reagan administration is
trying to reprivatize social problems. This is a monumental reversal of the long term
trend in capitalist states.
In the Reagan solution, care of the elderly should devolve back to the family. Health
costs and poverty should be a matter of private charity. Jobs should be made available in
the private sector by businesses. The disemployed should find a new niche in the economy
and take care of themselves. Hunger and housing problems should be handled by private
charity rather than by the capitalist state. Thus is the fiscal crisis of the capitalist
state to be solved. There can be no legitimacy problem for the Reagan administration (or
its successors) if these problems are not the proper concern of the state.
Capitalist relations create whole new realms of social problems to add to the long list of
those which preexist capitalism. The disconnection of whole groups of people from the
means of production by land seizure and by agricultural economics; by laws, rules and
policies which force retirement or exclude young people from work; by the concentration of
ownership in ever fewer hands; by automation and the "rationalization" of
industry all these and more disemploy healthy persons eager to work at productive
labor.
Pollution, exhaustion of natural resources, complex and dangerous weapons systems,
pesticides and herbicides, unsafe working conditions as well as forms of crime generated
by the false needs of capitalist advertising are the natural consequences of the profit
system. All these problems require the capitalist state to expand and create the policies,
programs and personnel to manage them. The capitalist state becomes the locus of
progressive politics.
The growth of national and international markets, the struggles for and against class
privilege, the struggles for social justice by Blacks, women, students and the poor, all
extend ancient social problems beyond local, and regional boundaries. The growth of the
world capitalist system since WWII now promises to move the struggles for social justice
across national boundaries. Support for Nicaragua by Canada and in Europe as well as
international sanctions against the Union of South Africa may auger these larger movement.
THE INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS: The inventory
of social problems increases since capitalism needs a thin and narrowly focussed democracy
in order to gain legitimacy for its new laws and rules of production and distribution over
against the legitimacy of feudal rules, communal rules and slaveholding rules of
ownership. However, this democracy has no natural limits of property, age, gender, or race
(unless biology or sociology can be used to accord a false legitimacy to inequality).
As people enter into democratic politics, their problems become registered in the public
sphere and the scope of social justice enlarges to include every nationality, every ethnic
group, every age group, every occupational group and each gender as well. The entry of
people into democratic politics has not been easy in any capitalist system. From the
violence against workers in the 1880's to that against civil rights workers in the U.S.A.
in the 50's, voting, negotiating and obtaining social justice has not been easily
accomplished. Syzmanski (198 ) has recorded the sad history of state violence against
workers in America along with that of the USSR.
With political power comes more effective control over definitions of the character of
social problems and the dimensions of social justice. Such social problems are not
"constructed" as some theorists would have it. They are real enough to real,
suffering people. Rather people get organized and force a consideration of their social
problems into the national political agenda. Until such time as those problems are
registered in a forum in which responsive action can occur, the problems are absorbed in
the bodies and families of workers, women and ethnic minority groups.
The increase in social problems listings also comes from positivities of capitalism. While
capitalism provides the technical means for social justice, it does not provide the social
relations to extend it. Hunger in a bountiful land, disease and infirmity in an excellent
medical system; poverty in the richest country on the face of the earth; endless warfare
over markets, raw materials and profits; unemployment when so much productive labor is
available and so much could be done; these contradictions provide the demand for social
justice.
The nationalization of social problems, the politicization of social problems, as well as
the expansion of that which was conceived of as a social problem all changed drastically
after capitalism took the advanced "monopoly" form which we see today. As
Campbell's soups, Wonder bread, Budweiser and C.B.S. grew to national proportions, social
problems also moved from private to social problems.
Within the U.S.A., as noted, the national response to poverty, racism, gender
discrimination and class struggle over surplus value and the work process was progressive.
The late 50's, 60's and early 70's were epochal in American life. 1930 was more like 1830
than it was like 1960. 1985 is several centuries away from 1895. In such a strategic
position with little foreign competition, a well trained labor power, raw materials, a
transport system built for the military operations in WWII, the economy flourished. One
after another, American corporations gave workers decent wages, safer working conditions,
better fringe benefits and greater job security in order to exploit their position in the
world economy.
Finance capital quickly appreciated that such a stable and prosperous workforce was an
excellent credit risk. With the generous aid of the Federal and State governments, credit
buying further expanded the demand for decent housing, for autos and for appliances. The
advertising industry grew to gigantic proportions creating still more demand much of
that demand of the character noted by Marcuse; layer upon layer of false needs were
generated requiring real goods to satisfy.
The American dream materialized for millions of veterans, farmers, skilled laborers,
Blacks, women and Chicanos. Housing, health care, education, transport, recreation as well
as entertainment from the new television industry created a vast reservoir of patriotism,
pride, aspirations, confidence in America as well as optimism. Talk about progress in
civil rights and social justice permeated lectures, books, news reports, political
campaigns and The Reader's Digest. The 30 years from 1945 to 1975 were the golden years of
American capitalism. Most of the political scientists, economists, historians, and
sociologists writing today grew up through that epoch or came out of it as a child. In
their view, class warfare was over and capitalism had won. The only thing remaining was to
extend the benefits of capitalism to the rest of the world via the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, A.I.D., and the 500 multinational corporations 300 of which
were American.
It must be said, as well, and never forgotten that social justice programs and policies in
the U.S. today, as progressive as they are, are based upon the very special place the
U.S.A. occupied in the world capitalist system after WWII. Social justice programs in the
U.S.A. depend in part upon the productivity of our magnificent industrial, financial and
commercial economy. The economy depended in turn upon the ingenuity, creativity, and
organizational genius of the capitalist class and their employees.
But these programs of social justice depended also upon the social relations the U.S.
corporations holds in the world capitalist camp. The 120 poor countries, more or less
caught up in the gambit of these 20 rich capitalist countries, provide the resources upon
which the capacity for social justice in the advanced capitalist societies rest. Profits,
food, raw materials and manufactured goods pour into the U.S.A. from all over the world.
The social relations in the world capitalist camp are such that the U.S. economy benefits
greatly from that flow of wealth. Our prosperity and our programs of social justice are
based in large part upon the inequities in the world capitalist camp of which the U.S.A.
is the leader. Much of the terror and torture in the third world originate in the logics
of capitalist economics. The workers and peasants in that third world pay a terrible price
for the many freedoms in the first world.
THE RENEWAL OF CLASS WARFARE IN AMERICA: Recent changes in
the world capitalist system have reduced the capacity of all 20 rich capitalist states to
fund social justice programs. The 120 semicapitalist poor nations of the Third World
fall ever farther behind in the uneven and sporadic quest for social justice as oil
prices, multinational corporate (MNC) profits and debt service charges on huge loans
increased in the 70's and 80's. The inequalities within the poor semicapitalist
countries and between rich and poor capitalist countries, increase monthly. As productive
as it is, the world capitalist system is unable to:
The immiseration thesis of Marx looks all too valid if one takes the world
capitalist system as a totality rather than the nationstate or just the few disemployed
workers of the rich nations.
In the U.S., class warfare is fought on many fronts and the capitalist class is winning. A
Marxian analysis asserts that the capitalist corporation must externalize its costs or
become unprofitable. For most of its brief history, capitalism has externalize cost to
workers, minorities or women, to the Third World, to the environment or to the future.
When workers, women, the Third World or environmental protection groups resist, capitalism
becomes very unprofitable and, one by one, lines of production slow and cease. Again . . .
a capitalist economy cannot afford to give 5, 10, or 15 percent of its proceeds to the
capitalist class and to provide programs of social justice for the disemployed and pay
decent wages and produce quality goods and support the huge military apparatus needed to
control the surplus population and Third World countries and clean up the rivers and air
at the same time.
There are compelling reasons which leads the Reagan administration to cut back, cut off,
and eliminate the social resources with which to deal with basic social problems. A whole
set of factors (summarized below) reduce gross national income in both the private sector
as well as the state sector. The fiscal base for social justice resources is reduced in
both sectors. The base for wage improvements is reduced in both private and state sectors.
The base for modernizing the economy as well as for research and development is reduced.
The adverse factors which affect the economy of the nation are summarized as follows:
Mr. Reagan has come to the management of the fiscal crisis of U.S. capitalism
with energy, acumen and sound policy (from the point of view of the capitalist system). He
uses disemployment to slow inflation. He uses law and order to control the disemployed. He
lowers the standards of legal control of corporate crimes and privileges by deregulating
industry after industry. He buys political legitimacy by deficit spending and by appeal to
the uglier racist, sexist, and patriotic attitudes of angry Americans. He has attacked the
very foundation of capitalist legitimacy by attacking the working class.
Early on in his administration, Mr. Reagan ended the historic compromise of the 50's by
busting the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) and by refusing to halt the fraudulent
use of bankruptcy to vitiate union contracts. The Reagan administration encouraged the
decertification movement of union shops. Mr. Reagan, as did Mr. Carter, told American
workers they would have to settle for less as capitalists demanded more. Workers would
have to give back wages, health benefits, vacation and pension benefits. Wage increases
slowed and reversed for large segments of the American work force.
Mr. Reagan strengthened the capacity to police (regulate) the lower working class and the
surplus population while he continued to "deregulate" the programs and agencies
which policed American corporations. Oil, gas, airlines, banks, trucks and the media were
deregulated while expenditures for police, prisons and judges increased. Crimes of the
poor were targeted while crimes of the rich were lightly policed. In the past ten years,
prison spending rose from $2.8 billion to $7.4 billion. Most people in prison are poor and
minority males. Over 90% are in prison for crimes against property. The justice system of
the U.S. is being bent back to serve the needs of the capitalist class. Justice in America
protects the merchant from shoplifters and women who write bad checks while it overlooks
crimes against communities, workers, customers, the environment as well as distortions in
the larger economy itself engineered by the capitalist class.
A law an order administration became a lawless administration as far as corporate crime
was concerned and as far as international law was concerned with its many violations of
treaties, accords, and the charters of the United Nations as well as that of the
Organization of American States. The Reagan administration continues to violate domestic
laws in subverting the government of Nicaragua. Such a radical transformation of the
historic trend in the U.S. derives from the need of the capitalist class for private
capital to meet competition in the third world, to control rebellion and revolution in the
third world and to balance the budget at home.
To balance that budget, Mr. Reagan first tried to transfer the costs of capitalism to the
young, the poor, the ill and the aged. Cutbacks in programs for the poor and the young
continue. Welfare, hot lunch, health care, aid to dependent children, college aid and
grants, social security, veteran's benefits and subsidies for farmers are all sacrificed
to a capitalism under siege in the macro politics of a distressed world economy.
Mr. Reagan has also accepted, tacitly, that women must be the unpaid workers of the
capitalist system. By supporting a traditional role for women, Mr. Reagan accepts that the
American family is to absorb the costs of health, welfare and education with the wife
being the nurse, the teacher and the domestic servant of a male worker. And, Mr. Reagan
tacitly accepts as well a second class status for Blacks, who, for as long as they are
second class, provide a cheap labor pool with which to drive down wages, take jobs from
more expensive white labor and save money for employers. The racism fueled by such
competition seldom enters into the "State of the Union" address by the
President. American capital itself appreciates Mr. Reagan's help. Some 140 billion dollars
has been added to the income of the richest quintile while eighttoten billion has been
lost to the poorest quintile in the American population.
The logics of capitalism require the state help an unthrifty economic system by increasing
the flow of wealth to the capitalist class and decreasing the flow of wealth to workers,
the disemployed, the aged and children in need. At the same time, the logics of democracy
require political response to social injustice. Such response requires economic resources.
The middleclass family as well as the upper level working class family can meet most of
the needs of the extended family but lower workingclass families and disemployed
families can't meet all needs. The democratic state must fund real needs else it loses
legitimacy.
It has three places it can get funds: from the working class, from the capitalist class or
from surplus value generated in the Third World. The capitalist class is ultimately exempt
from all but token taxation else capitalism disappears. In the final analysis, only
workers at home and/or workers abroad can provide funds for material resources.
It is the conditions of the world capitalist camp that generate the policies of the Reagan
administration. It is not that Mr. Reagan is a heartless, ruthless, evil man. Nor are his
advisors. Nor are his appointees. Nor are the C.I.A. agents, the military officers who
engineer repression in the Third World or the officials of A.I.D., I.M.F. or World Bank
who execute Reagan policy at home and abroad. Mr. Reagan is a good and decent man. It is a
major analytic error to personify the sources of structural problems. Reagan does what
needs to be done to save the world capitalist system and the favored position of the U.S.
multinational corporations in it. But for increasing millions of workers, women and
peasants in the USA and in the third world, Reaganomics is reagonomics...the agonomics of
poverty, squalor and brutal repression.
SPENDING CULTURAL CAPITAL: In spite of his open partisan
warfare against workers, Mr. Reagan obtains the necessary loyalty of Americans in
fashioning his revolutionary economics and politics. He gets it by a number of tactics.
These tactics, collectively involve the creation and expenditure of cultural capital.
While finance capital flows copiously to the capitalist class, workers and women get
cultural capital. That involves several tasks for Mr. Reagan:
These tactics cost the capitalist class very little in the way of
real expenses. They tend to help capitalism at home by pacifying workers with patriotic
delight while alive and religious hope after death for whatever social justice they feel
due them. It keeps wages of women and Blacks down. The military adventures retains markets
and keep low cost raw materials available from the Third World. Mr. Reagan has found a
formula for preserving capitalist relations during his tenure in office. Wealth for the
capitalist class to renew the economy and intangible rewards for the slipping working
class.
One must agree that the formula is effective. Inflation is down even if disemployment is
high. Socialist and populist movements in the Third World are controlled even if
conditions in the poor capitalist countries daily deteriorate. Middle class families
prosper even if their ranks diminish. Americans are once again proud even if the U.S.
earns the contempt of each new generation of young people in the Third World. Large
corporations prosper even if small businesses and farmers are in trouble.
The Reagan policies work because they, once again, transfer the alienation of capitalist
relations to the working poor, to the disemployed, to women, the aged, minorities and to
workers in the Third World. Again, we buy our peace and our prosperity and our very
substantial programs of social justice at the horrible cost of unfreedom, exploitation,
misery and poverty in the Third World.
Capitalism can only survive by transferring its problems to parallel,noncapitalist
economy systems. In the U.S., charity, the state, the family and friendship relations
provide such parallel systems of distribution. In the Third World, semislave, feudal and
authoritarian economics are the parallel systems which provide surplus value to the U.S.
and other rich nations.
AND WHAT OF TOMORROW?: In order for American capitalism to
survive, social justice must suffer in the 20 rich capitalist states and oppression must
escalate in the 120 poor capitalist countries. Fascism is the future of the world
capitalist bloc unless, onebyone the 120 poor countries adopt some form of democratic
socialism. And in the 20 rich capitalist countries: England, France, Germany, Italy,
Greece, Spain, Sweden and Norway there will be periodic swings left then right then left
as liberals then conservatives find they cannot solve the contradictions of capitalism
within the logics of capitalism unless workers, women and the Third World absorb its
unacceptable, unnecessary costs. History is on the side of workers, women, and the Third
World. The larger trend is toward socialism and social justice even if the capitalist
class is winning the class struggle in the U.S. during the Reagan years.
If we are to move toward social justice, material resources are necessary. Nonexploitative
relations are necessary. Effective socialization as well as productive work for young
people is necessary. Repression of corporate crime as well as organized and street crime
is necessary. Unalienated sexuality is necessary. Authentic and comprehensive democracy is
necessary at work, in school and in community. We must protect the environment, husband
natural resources, moderate false needs, use low energy systems of transport, food
production, heating and living. We must provide balance between social institutions. We
must work for a real peace rather than one which freezes existing iniquities. We must
reverse the flow of food and wealth from the poorest to the richest nations. We must end
racism, sexism, national chauvinism as well as class relations. All this needs to be done
together and soon.
Much is being made of the the tax reform bill of 1986. While it is still in the Congress,
it promises to curb reagonomics. It uses the fiscal power of the state to shift the tax
burden back to the corporations and to higher income families. This is a dramatic reversal
called forth by the legitimacy needs of the democratic state rather than the accumulation
needs (very real needs) of the capitalist class. Should the bill become law and should it
survive the President's power of veto, it would once again move the U.S. in the direction
of social justice. It would provide workers with resources to maintain a decent standard
of living.
But it would also cripple the economy. Higher taxes mean lower profits for the capitalist
class and lower profits mean capital flight. Bluestone and Harrison (1982) report that,
since l970, 38 million jobs have disappeared as private capital leaves the U.S. Some 35
million new jobs have developed, mostly in low paying, dead end jobs with little job
security and fewer fringe benefits. These are the jobs women are taking as they enter the
work force in increasing numbers to augment the family income.
For the immediate future, the Reagan revolution may be over. The next president or two
will probably respond to the populist sentiment of workers, consumers, and minorities. It
is possible that the radical right may be able to continue to gain strength and to elect
congresspersons. The Fall, 1986 elections will be interesting in this regard. Whatever the
response to Reaganomics in this election, the long range trend is for more competition in
the world capitalist system to the disadvantage of the local capitalist; more resistance
to the flow of wealth from the debtor nations in the third world; more costly military
expenditures; and more capital flight to cheap labor markets in those "friendly"
nations which are able to provide labor peace.
In order to secure progressive politics at home and abroad, it is necessary to move from
the thin and narrowly focussed politics engineered by the capitalist class to the strong
democracy set forth in Barber's (1984) work on strong democracy. Central to such politics
is the use of interactive electronics technology together with neighborhood assemblies
with direct voting on national, state, and local referenda.
There are many more questions which grow out of the historic conflicts of today; out of
the class struggles of today and out of the sequelae of the class struggle tomorrow. The
role of the critical theorist and scholar is to help pose these questions and support the
most humane answers generated. The immediate task of the radical scholar is to provide the
American public with a comprehensive understanding of the policies of the Reagan
administration to warn Americans away from fascism and to fashion a democratic socialism
that fits well within the structure of human rights broadly conceived to include the good
earth and all its life forms.
American sociology in the ASA and the SSSP has a special obligation to provide the data
and analysis of justice and injustice benefiting as we do from the special position of the
richest, most powerful nation at the peak of the world capitalist system of exploitation.
REFERENCES
Brents, Barbara. 1986 Social Welfare Programs in the U.S., paper presented at annual
meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society. Des Moines, Iowa.
Barber, Benjamin. 1984 Strong Democracy. Berkeley: The U. of California Press.
Bluestone, Barry and Bennett Harrison. 1982 The Deindustrialization of America. New York:
Basic Books.
Dolbeare, Kenneth. 1986 Democracy at Risk. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham Press.
Magaziner, Ira and Robert Reich. 1982. Minding America's Business. New York: Harcourt
Brace and Jovanovich.
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