By Richard Mellor in California
The US House of Representatives passed the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Relief Bill late Thursday night, as Democrats passed their own legislation that includes reinstating a weekly $600 addition to Unemployment Benefit.
The late passing of the legislation was due to the Democrats hoping that Republicans, who control the US senate, would agree on a joint deal. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, has been negotiating with Steven Mnuchin (both pictured left), the former banker and Treasury Secretary in the Trump Administration, but they failed to reach a bi-partisan agreement. The Democratic plan has “no chance” of passing in the Senate, Republicans say, and Republicans control that body.
Unemployment benefit ‘too high’
The elimination of the $600 supplement in the middle of a pandemic, had a devastating effect on workers and their families, and Trump issued an executive order reducing it to $300 a week, in the hope it would boost his election chances. We need to think long and hard about this. One of the justifications some Republicans gave for eliminating the $600 aid to workers, is that $600 is ‘too high’ because workers will stay at home and collect unemployment instead of going back to work. This is the same logic for the opposition to unemployment benefit in general.
This is how the capitalist class sees working people. They think we are like them: thieves, con-artists and lazy. Working people yearn to be productive, we thrive when we produce and without production there is no life. In every workplace I’ve worked, in the US or the UK, working people have no love for people that don’t carry their weight, who don’t do their “fair share”. Those who are like that are the most prone to ingratiate themselves with the boss, with the ‘powers’ in the workplace, hopefully to get out of work altogether.
Work in capitalist society is alienating and degrading, as we are excluded from the organization of work and ownership of the product of our collective labour. I have worked on assembly lines and that helped me understand why the demand for control of the belt speed has been such an important issue in the history of labour/management relations. The public sector is a little different as competition is not as savage, but that is changing rapidly.
Two millionaires discuss our fate
But what I couldn’t let go of, as I read the latest news about these negotiations, is that the fate of millions of workers is being discussed by two millionaires. Nancy Pelosi is worth close to $100 million and Mnuchin was worth close to $400 million in 2019, according to Forbes. They are both representatives of the US capitalist class and senior figures in the two capitalist parties that have dominated US political and economic life for over 100 years.
The Democratic Party won’t disagree with the Republicans about workers, that we are lazy and shiftless. They won’t disagree that they are where they are due to ‘hard work’ and ‘being smart’. The Democrats are a little craftier about making a big deal of this class snobbery, especially when the society they govern is being held up through a pandemic by the very people they consider beneath them, and these very same people who rescued their system from collapse only a decade earlier.
As these representatives of capital bicker about whether workers should receive a few hundred dollars a week (of our own money) in a time of crisis, we discover that Mnuchin’s friend, US president Donald Trump, paid no taxes for some 10 years. We read all the time about corporations that pay no tax. A study a few years ago estimated that there was some $26 trillion stashed in offshore accounts avoiding taxes, and this was personal wealth, not corporate cash, if my memory serves me right.
Defence budget is sacrosanct
There is no talk between these two parties of eliminating some of the 800 bases and facilities that US imperialism has around the world, to protect the interests of US corporations and their plundering of these societies. The misnamed “defence” budget is sacrosanct, too much profit to be made in that industry. The Trump Administration and his Republican backers are looking to spend $1 tn to upgrade US nuclear forces as well.
Then there’s Bezos, Gates, Buffet, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, the ‘founder’ of Oracle, who is a Trump favourite. These and many more parasitical characters, whose lifestyles are the monkey that the US and global working class has on its backs. As one woman put it to me recently, “people will whine about a woman on welfare who gets caught trying to buy a pack of cigs with food stamps and then praises someone like Trump or Buffet as hard working innovators”.
So we have these two parties and their representatives deciding our, and in many ways, the world’s fate. How long the US working class will tolerate this robbery is hard to say, but we are already seeing the results of a system in decay with the massive, mostly peaceful, protests against police violence, racism and the most important issue of all, climate change.
Battles in the streets
One way or another, as the battles in the streets and work places intensify, as the resistance to the capitalist crisis being laid at our door heats up, this mass opposition will inevitably find a political expression and an independent alternative to the two parties of capitalism will arise. How this will develop exactly, no one can say. It will be a party of reform, as workers do not move immediately to overthrow the system but to make it ‘better’. It is the through the struggle for reforms that we learn that society has to change in a more fundamental way
Things will never be the same after this pandemic and the experience of the Trump presidency. Consciousness has changed, lessons have been learned and US capitalism has been exposed as the abject failure it is. The celebrity gossip, the mindless sports chatter and all the other sideshows have been silent in the wake of the pandemic and the pandemic recession ahead.
There’s still a lot to be cheerful about.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original, and other articles and blogs, can be found here
