Henry Kaufman is not a name that's likely to be familiar to millions of workers. They're not likely to find his name on the sports pages or on television news reports. Nor does he make the rounds of talk shows.He rarely appears in public, and he certainly doesn't engage in political debate. He is chiefly involved in that charmed inner circle of big business and high finance.
He himself is not regarded as one of the billionaires. But Henry Kaufman makes plenty of big bucks advising money managers and investment companies, as well as banks. He has over the years generally confined himself to monitoring the bond market, interest rates and the like.
During the Reagan administration the Wall Street community of sharks and thieves regarded Henry Kaufman almost as a prophet because he seemed to so accurately gauge the constant rise in interest rates.
But on March 2 he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he appealed to the presidential candidates to call off any debate on the economy! Kaufman getting into the thick of the political struggle--that seems strange.
Why did he do it?
He did it because he, reflecting the ruling class, is fearful of the rising call for jobs, jobs, jobs. It's got him worried sick.
"I recommend a moratorium on formal deliberations on all fiscal initiatives until after the elections," he wrote.
To make such an extraordinary demand, Kaufman and the barons of Wall Street must be real scared. The economy, he says, is stagnating and it's bound to get worse. All this talk about jobs, with each candidate promising more and more, is bound to get out of hand. That kind of debate, he thinks, poses real risks--for the ruling class.
It's therefore best to put it on ice until after the election. Then Congress can take it up some time in the middle of 1993. And maybe, Kaufman hopes, by that time the economic situation might possibly ease.
Kaufman is regarded as a guru of high finance. It is a measure of the depth of the economic crisis that he is so concerned about the capitalist candidates' increasing demagogy on the economy--and promises of jobs, in particular.
Afraid of the masses
Kaufman reflects the fears of the ruling class. And he is terrified that the capitalist candidates' election demagogy is bound to arouse the masses so much they will look for action and not mere promises. This prospect, as Kaufman and the ruling financiers and bankers see it, might lead the masses to move toward taking things into their own hands.
Right now the capitalist candidates are merely engaging in soft demagogy. But the masses are paying attention to the part of it that deals with the economic situation. They are most certainly interested in the question of their own situation, and are following the candidates to get a clue as to how they can be helped. Fear and uncertainty about the future haunt millions of workers.
In election years when the capitalist economy is relatively stable, workers pay less attention to the election campaign. Only about half the eligible voters vote in a national election.
The capitalist press gives no accurate picture of how many are unemployed or partially employed. For instance, only companies that lay off more than 500 workers are legally required to report it to the government. But companies that lay off in smaller groups than 500 at a time are not required to report it. And the number of laid-off workers in this category must be in six-digit figures by now.
The Bush administration has not only cut expenditures and thus laid off hundreds of thousands in the apparatus of the federal government. It has also cut the staffs that gather statistics and were formerly obligated to make them public. Even so, it was up to the capitalist press to prominently publish them and not hide the figures in the back pages of the financial section.
Importance of Baltimore conference
One unique feature of this capitalist economic crisis is that there have been few conferences to address its consequences and how it affects the workers. And there has been none that has called for action, or even carried out serious deliberation about the perilous situation of the millions of workers.
Instead, the masses are being steered strictly into the parliamentary or electoral process--to the neglect of any action or even deliberation about what action to take. Of course, no Marxist is opposed to participation in parliamentary elections in principle. But the masses in reality have been left helpless. Their only job, according to the bourgeois media, is to watch the debates among the capitalist candidates. They get to watch each candidate try to outdo the other without making any real promise of specific actions, even after the election.
It is therefore very fortunate that a conference is to take place in Baltimore on March 28. It promises to take up the economic situation in a way that prepares the masses to take things into their own hands instead of remaining paralyzed by the capitalist politicians' deceptive demagogy.
This is to be a distinctly deliberative body that will emerge with a program of action for the immediate future. It is not an organized grouping with a pre-digested program handed down. There will not be a monologue, but a dialogue among all the participants. The organizers say they are going to rely on the mass of those attending to participate and give their views.
By all indications, it should be a body that represents the sentiment of the workers and the oppressed in this country. They will assess the situation and lay plans for action.
That is indeed a tall order. Past conferences have turned out to be a sounding board for this or that candidate, and have passed away without leaving a trace after the election. The organizers obviously intend this conference to turn out differently, judging by the literature they've issued. They would be wise to be guided by certain objective facts that are ordinarily completely overlooked in all the talk about the severity of the economic crisis and the hardships of the masses.
Inevitable crises
They should not confine themselves merely to criticizing the Bush and Reagan administrations--or the Carter administration earlier, and the Democratic politicians who control both houses of Congress as well as many city and state governments. And above all they should avoid making the mistake of believing the crisis is due merely to inept or corrupt politicians. Nor should they confine themselves to giving the banks and the military-industrial complex a sound drubbing.
Of course that would be all to the good. They're all responsible, alright. But that only scratches the surface.
The broader truth is that economic crises are absolutely inevitable under capitalism. They occur independently of the will even of the capitalists themselves.
It is possible for the capitalists to cause a financial panic, to rig prices, share out markets, conspire with the government to sell it all kinds of equipment at extortionate prices, and make the government itself a mere tool of the giant banks and the military-industrial complex. The capitalist government has always been merely the executive committee of the ruling class, anyway. But one thing they have been unable to do, try as they may, is to prevent any capitalist crisis.
Since 1825 there have been dozens of economic crises. Just as many times, politicians and the capitalists themselves have tried to stem the tide. They've tried to either avoid the crisis or cure the situation. But they have never succeeded in anything but delaying the crisis. And it always breaks out later with much greater destructive force.
This must be kept in mind by the organizers of the March 28 conference. No capitalist crisis can be delayed for an indefinite length of time. In recent decades, militarism has been a relatively effective means to delay an economic crisis by diverting the economy into military channels--sometimes at the cost of millions of lives, as proved by World Wars I and II, for example. All the capitalist powers engaged in those wars. Each one opted for militarism as a way to stop the capitalist economic crisis. World War II, for instance, pulled the system out of the total collapse of the 1930s.
War no longer a stimulant
The U.S., Germany, Italy, France, Japan--each of these capitalist countries, whether democratic or fascist, was trying to stop an economic crisis and to redivide markets or spheres of influence. The capitalist system had broken down in 1931, and no amount of tinkering with currencies, raising or lowering interest rates, using inflation or deflation as a way out did the trick. They all ultimately chose to divert the economic crisis into war channels.
But what happened with the Gulf war? The U.S. imperialists and their allies had the basic idea of diverting the economic crisis, which was already taking effect in 1990 in the U.S. They hoped the war would pump new life into the economy and give the imperialists a breathing spell. By using the military as an economic stimulus, they sought to get the capitalist system back on its feet and restore capitalist stability.
But this economic stimulus, which had been used so often over the past few decades, had now turned into a depressant. As anyone can now see, the Gulf war did not bring capitalist stability or create more jobs. Just the opposite. The depressing effect of this narcotic stimulant brought about worse unemployment, which is now steeply rising throughout the country.
The ruling class is really frightened about this. Henry Kaufman expressed it very accurately. Most of all they are afraid of what will happen if the masses begin to take things into their own hands.
They want to stop all the talk about jobs. The capitalists want their politicians to just stop talking about the economy altogether.
World situation ripe for international workers' solidarity
So if the March 28 conference is actually to be a conference of initiators who are also realists, the real challenge before it is to take into account the nature of the capitalist crisis. They should recognize that it flows inevitably and irresistibly out of the profit system--with the same force and effect as if it were a natural catastrophe.
But does that mean they should take a fatalistic view of the economic crisis? By no means. It does mean this: Instead of relying on the lies and schemes of the bourgeoisie, the workers and oppressed must take independent mass action of a type so meaningful it will challenge the very foundations of the capitalist system as a whole.
This conference should be different than any other in the past that concerned itself with the struggle against unemployment, racism, sexism and lesbian/gay oppression. It should take into account the multinational character of the working class, worldwide and in the U.S. The bourgeois professors and politicians constantly drum into workers' heads propaganda about the integrated character of the world economy and how everything is connected by ever newer technology. According to them, the only possible outcome of this new technology is not more cooperation among the world's peoples but competition among the capitalists. They therefore urge U.S. workers on to produce more efficiently and outdo the Japanese, German and other workers.
The bosses' Japan-bashing propaganda is a device to divide the workers. The world economy today is of course interconnected. It has been for many, many years.
The new world economy proves above all else that economic conditions worldwide have become thoroughly ripe for genuine international class solidarity among the workers. The bosses and bankers try to hide this from the workers.
Above all, the ruling class tries to divert workers here from searching for ways to collaborate with the millions of oppressed and super-exploited workers in the less developed countries of the Third World to defend their mutual interests. Hundreds of millions of workers abroad are being victimized by the same avaricious, predatory transnational corporations that have waged a ruthless anti-labor offensive here for more than a decade.
The workers in the oppressed countries and in the metropolitan imperialist countries such as the U.S. have a common enemy--and they should have a common objective in the struggle to break the chains of capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression. It is only from this internationalist vantage point that the conferees on March 28 can hope to construct a progressive, meaningful economic program that answers the needs of the working class here and lays a foundation for a victorious struggle in the future.