Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >The material on
> >Social Security has always been obvious.
>
> To whom?
>
[I'd finished writing this post when the program hung up and I lost it. I'll see if I can reproduce it.]
I did call it one of the open secrets of capitalism. It wasn't obvious to most of the public. And even in so far as it was obvious, it was not so in a way that could generate mass organizing in defense of it.
I think it was 20+ years ago that an ex-president of the AEA (I think a Northwestern Prof. of Econ) wrote an op-ed in the WSJ very effectively pooh-poohing fears re SS. And you wrote your article in 1998 -- which was quite a while ago. :-)
For many years [pre-911] I sort of hoped that threats to SS might be a focus for organizing, but it seems it can't be. Even most of those who passively (e.g., in answer to polls) 'support' SS don't seem prepared to "do" anything about it -- except perhaps to vote for a DP president who will keep his [her?] pants buttoned and really do it in. There are other routes to the destruction of SS than privatization. Inflation, for example (as is being tentatively discussed on pen-l), without a sufficient increase in SS benefits. That's how the minimum wage is being made increasingly irrelevant. (Even with a very low rate of inflation such as we have had for 20 years, it goes up enough so an income that never goes up falls further and further behind. It's been happening, for example, for over 20 years to the civil service employees at ISU.)
The Nation, Counterpunch, LBO, MR, etc are not and cannot function as agitational or organizing agencies. I can't see hawking the best articles from any of them at the current equivalent of factory gates. (Probably Malls -- which are private property anyhow and forbid leafletting.) Hence if the open secret of the health of SS is to be made knowledge-in-practice it will probably have to be through the agency of a mass movement generated on other issues.
The war against SS probably can be dated back to Carter's statement that the world isn't fair. It's sort of a 'natural' development from the 'give-backs' that grandually broke what power the unions still had (late 70s? early '80s?).
The _analysis_ we need (as distinct from agitational material _and_ agents to embody that material in mass struggle) is a better understanding of the reasons for the attack on social security. That intersects, I suspect, with the military adventures of the last decade (beginning with the first Gulf War and then Yugoslavia). The ruling class is either fearful _or_ so damn confident that some substantial number of them believe there are no limits.
Carrol