http://themilitant.com/2016/8043/804350.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 43 November 14, 2016
(feature article)
Clintons’ ‘workfare reform’: rulers’ biggest blow yet to protections won
as by-product of workers’ struggles
From new book by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes
The excerpt below from The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why
Washington Fears Working People is based on a March 2001 talk by Jack
Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. Copyright ©
2016 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY JACK BARNES
The Clintons are now, finally, out of the White House. From the outset
of his 1992 presidential campaign, the Socialist Workers Party insisted
that “Bill” Clinton would be a war president, a prison president, a
death-penalty president. He would be a president, like those before him,
whose course at home and abroad was aimed at serving the class interests
of the US ruling families. Above all, we insisted that the Clintons had
not been, and would not be, friends of the working class, in city or
country.
The same we can say with confidence is true of Clinton’s successor,
George W. Bush, and of the Congress, then and now.
The landmark of the Clinton administration’s anti-working-class assault,
carried out in tandem with the Republican-controlled Congress, was
contemptuously named the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act of 1996. This brutal, anti-working-class legislation
eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), put a
federally dictated lifetime limit of five years on welfare payments to
any family, and allowed state governments to cap the number of years at
an even lower level than five. States receiving federal “block grants”
under the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program are
not required to spend those funds on cash payments to families — and
more and more often they don’t.
The “reform” was an incarnation of Clinton’s reactionary 1992 campaign
pledge to “end welfare as we know it,” but it was also more than that.
It was the biggest single success of the rulers so far in beginning to
erode the federal Social Security system — a concession forced from the
employing class in the 1930s as a by-product of massive working-class
struggles that built the industrial unions and advanced the integration
of Blacks into industrial jobs. Those conquests were widely expanded in
the 1960s and 1970s, as the powerful proletarian-based Black rights
movement and its broad social extensions wrested further weighty gains
from the ruling class: Medicare, Medicaid, “SSI” (Supplemental Security
Income) disability benefits, and cost-of-living protections.
Under the Clintons’ “welfare reform,” immigrants without “papers” were
explicitly denied not only TANF benefits but also food stamps, Medicaid,
and SSI payments. Even immigrants with “legal” residency (that is, a
“Green Card”) were barred from food stamps and federal disability
protection. TANF and Medicaid “eligibility” was denied them for five
years and then left up to state governments.1
Clinton’s welfare legislation — not just its basic provisions, but even
its name — was taken over lock, stock, and barrel from a plank in the
so-called Contract with America promised by the Newt Gingrich–led
Republican majority that swept into Congress in 1994, two years after
Clinton was elected.
The most vocal and historically clearest opponent in Congress of the
anti-working-class destructiveness of the bipartisan “welfare reform”
was Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. The
legislation was “an act of unprecedented social vindictiveness,”
Moynihan said. Its consequences for children, women, and others might
initially be buffered by the paper-fueled “tech-stock” bubble of the
late 1990s, he said, but these effects would explode with a vengeance
during the next inevitable deep recession — like the one we’re entering
right now in 2001.
“In a very little while as the time limits come into effect,” Moynihan
warned, “we will say, ‘why are these children sleeping on grates?’”
Moynihan, a Harvard sociology professor for many years, had long been a
critic of AFDC. On their own, Moynihan said, cash payments to dependent
children, most of them in families headed by women, couldn’t address
what he considered the roots of poverty among African Americans:
joblessness. Especially among young Black men, it was at “disaster
levels.” Without a federal public works program to tackle that crisis —
and this was at the heart of what Moynihan recounted — poorer families
in Black communities would continue to be torn apart. More and more of
them would be headed by single women, with less and less assistance,
unable to provide a stable economic and social haven of support for
children.
Vivid descriptions of such devastation of families in working-class
districts in nineteenth century England abound in Capital by Karl Marx
and The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 by Frederick
Engels.
But so long as dog-eat-dog capitalist social relations exist, the family
is what children, the elderly, the sick, and other working people have
to fall back on.
In 1965, when Moynihan was a little-known assistant secretary of labor
in the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, he had written an internal
report entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. “The
Negro American revolution is rightly regarded as the most important
domestic event of the postwar period in the United States,” he wrote.
“Nothing like it has occurred since the upheavals of the 1930’s which
led to the organization of the great industrial unions.” As a result of
that struggle, he said, the expectations of Blacks “will go beyond civil
rights,” and “they will now expect that in the near future equal
opportunities will produce roughly equal results.”
Equality isn’t possible, however, so long as “the racist virus in the
American blood stream still afflicts us,” Moynihan pointed out. It’s not
possible so long as the gap in income and living standards “between the
Negro and most other groups in American society is widening.”
Those conditions had been magnified by the rapid migration of Blacks
from the rural South to segregated ghettos in northern cities that began
during World War I. Moynihan himself had lived much of his childhood in
New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in an Irish working-class family headed by his
mother. Drawing on that experience, he wrote that — like the northward
“Great Migration” of Blacks — it had been the abrupt transition from
rural Ireland to large cities in the United States “that produced the
wild Irish slums of the 19th Century Northeast.”
“Eventually, the Irish closed that gap, and Moynihan has no doubt that
the Negroes will too,” said Time magazine in a 1967 cover story about
him. But that’s where the class limitations of Moynihan’s bourgeois
liberal outlook came into play. He didn’t give enough weight to the fact
that in addition to many common economic and social conditions bearing
down on all working people, workers who are Black confront a unique,
concrete historic obstacle to “closing the gap”— systematic
discrimination, bigotry, and physical dangers simply due to the color of
their skin.
That national oppression is something Irish and other workers who are
Caucasian do not confront. Like Italians, Greeks, or many other
immigrants, they became “white” over time in the racist US capitalist
society (at least enough to “pass” as a national grouping). But
descendants of African slaves do not — even those who “act white.” They
bear a lasting relic under capitalism of the barbaric slave trade and
involuntary servitude. A relic, above all, of the bloody defeat of
post–Civil War Radical Reconstruction and decades of legal Jim Crow
racist segregation across the US South and de facto discrimination
nationwide. It’s a deeply entrenched legacy that only the overturn of
the dictatorship of capital and revolutionary conquest of power by the
working class can open the road to fighting to end for all time.
Not only did the Johnson administration reject the proposals in The
Negro Family: The Case for National Action, but when Moynihan’s 1965
report was leaked to the press, he was condemned by many liberals, Black
nationalists, and middle class radicals as a racist who “blamed the
victim,” especially Black women. It’s clear that most of these “critics”
never bothered to read or seriously consider what Moynihan wrote.2
Nor did Moynihan convince Richard Nixon to take action on public works
or other proposals when he served as White House urban affairs adviser
in 1969, although Moynihan did get Nixon’s ear more often than he had
gotten LBJ’s. A Family Assistance Plan proposed by Nixon with Moynihan’s
backing — a monthly “guaranteed minimum income” for a family of four,
regardless of how many parents were in the home — was defeated by a
Senate coalition of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
Nixon implemented the “Philadelphia Plan,” for the first time setting
affirmative-action targets for hiring Blacks on federally funded
construction projects. And he ended the draft.
But the percentage of children living below the government’s own poverty
level kept climbing — from 14 percent in 1968 to 23 percent at the
opening of the Clinton administration in 1993. So when Clinton publicly
cited Moynihan’s 1965 report in order to rationalize his pledge to “end
welfare as we know it,” Moynihan had had enough. The senior senator from
New York shouted from the rooftops that Clinton’s legislation promoted
“cruelty” toward families and perpetuated “social devastation.” That
Democratic administration was destined to “go down in history as [one]
that abandoned, eagerly abandoned, the national commitment to dependent
children.”
Shortly before leaving office in January 2001, Clinton boasted that 8
million people nationwide had been slashed from state welfare rolls — a
60 percent drop in less than half a decade. What the bourgeois
supporters of this legislation don’t trumpet so loudly, however, is that
the vast majority of these former AFDC recipients, if they’ve been able
to find work at all, have been pressed into jobs at minimum wage or
below it, with few if any health, pension, or vacation benefits.
And that has been during the high point of the upturn in the capitalist
business cycle. As the first targets of the legislation’s five-year
limit are cut off permanently from welfare payments in the months ahead,
they will find themselves in the midst of mounting layoffs and rising
unemployment.
Clinton’s 1996 act was the first time that an entire group of working
people — single mothers and their children — has been eliminated from
the kind of protections Social Security is supposed to offer to
retirees, children, workers injured or thrown out of a job, and others
vulnerable to the instabilities and devastations inherent in capitalism,
both in good times and bad.
What’s more, this section of the working class is one that’s expanding
in the United States. In 1965, when Moynihan wrote The Negro Family, the
“crisis” figure he cited for the number of Black children raised in
families headed by single women was 25 percent. A half century later,
that’s the percentage for all single-parent households headed by women,
whatever their skin color. The figure for Blacks has risen to more than
70 percent.
Meanwhile, the poverty, lack of steady employment, and disintegration of
families and other social relations — all imposed by the operations of
capitalism on millions of working-class men, women, and children —
register the inevitable consequences of a social system based on class
exploitation and national oppression.
In this regard, another well-known article by Moynihan — a 1993 piece
entitled, “Defining Deviancy Down” — poses questions that are important
for the working-class vanguard. Moynihan wrote the article shortly after
the spring 1992 social explosion in Los Angeles in reaction to the
acquittal of four cops whose arrest and beating of Rodney King, an
African American, had been widely televised.
Among the “deviant” social trends Moynihan focused on were the
accelerating breakdown of the family structure, the sharp reduction in
real income of poor families receiving AFDC benefits, and the rising
violent crime rate (the last of these peaked the following year and has
been falling since then). This was not the first time in American
history, he said, that such “crime, violence, unrest, [and] lashing out
at the whole social structure had been seen,” especially among jobless
“young men” from “broken families.” Once again calling on his own
working-class family background, Moynihan noted lessons “from the wild
Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn
suburbs of Los Angeles.”
The biggest danger, Moynihan said, is yielding to those social layers
who “benefit from redefining the problem as essentially normal and doing
little to reduce it” — “defining deviancy down,” in his words. (Moynihan
was speaking from his own class standpoint, about dangers to the
capitalist government, political parties, and social order they represent.)
On the one hand, wrote Moynihan, “This redefining has evoked fierce
resistance from defenders of ‘old’ standards, and accounts for much of
the present ‘cultural war’ such as proclaimed by many at the 1992
Republican National Convention.” He didn’t elaborate on that reference,
but he clearly had in mind the widely publicized convention speech in
which Patrick Buchanan recounted (with considerable exaggeration) how US
Army and National Guard units — “M-16s at the ready” — had taken back
Los Angeles “block by block” that spring. In the same way, Buchanan
said, “we must take back our cities and take back our culture and take
back our country.” That’s how the “war going on in our country for the
soul of America” will be won, Buchanan said. “It is a cultural war, as
critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War
itself.”
On the other hand, Moynihan pointed to “solutions,” also clearly not to
his liking, that were gaining ground among more dominant sections of
both ruling-class parties, including the recently elected Democratic
administration of Bill and Hillary Clinton. “We are building new prisons
at a prodigious rate,” Moynihan cautioned at the close of his article.
“Similarly, the executioner is back. There is something of a competition
in Congress to think up new offenses for which the death penalty seems
the only available deterrent.”
That’s why Moynihan, the liberal politician and professor, was opposed
to “defining deviancy down.” But for working people — for reasons of our
own independent class interests — the stakes are much greater in not
“defining down” social attitudes, habits, and conditions that divide our
class, or that tear apart our political confidence, disciplined
functioning, combativity, and morale.
Preying on fellow workers and farmers; judging each other on the basis
of skin color, national origin, religion, or sex, instead of what we do;
showing up drunk or stoned to a picket line or defense guard — none of
this is “essentially normal” to a working class that is organizing and
resisting, a class whose emancipation from exploitation can only be won
by our own independent political organization and disciplined action.
None exemplifies the norm included by Marx and Engels in the rules they
drafted in 1847 for the world’s first communist organization — “a way of
life and activity which corresponds” to the political integrity and aims
of the class-conscious workers movement.
That’s the challenge that has faced every revolutionary movement of the
working class and oppressed — from the mass workers struggles that
forged the industrial unions in the United States; to the Black-led
mobilizations for civil rights that brought down Jim Crow segregation
and opened the road to internationalist working-class leaders such as
Malcolm X; to the Rebel Army that led the workers and farmers of Cuba in
a triumphant socialist revolution; to the struggle for a proletarian
party that will make possible a socialist revolution in the United States.
1. As a result of growing dissatisfaction with these provisions of the
“reform,” federal legislation adopted in 2002 made immigrants under
eighteen years of age with a Green Card eligible for food stamps, as it
did adults who’ve had resident status for at least five years.
2. A half century later, a few liberals and especially
nationalist-minded Blacks have acknowledged much of what Moynihan
observed and recorded. These include Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the
2015 best-seller Between the World and Me, written in response to the
police killings of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and the “friskings,
detainings, beatings, and humiliations …common to black people.” In a
2013 Atlantic magazine article titled “Revisiting the Moynihan Report,
Cont.,” Coates said it’s “really hard to separate out segregation from
employment and family stability. That’s a subject worthy of debate. But
Moynihan didn’t get debate. He got condemnation.”
Related articles:
‘Welfare reform’ — its toll on the working class
Welfare for work promise ‘didn’t pay off in end’
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