The economic crisis and the resurgence of class conflict in the United States

international | worker & community struggles and protests | other press Sunday May 24, 2009 23:09 by Terence

Contains history of number of strike days per year for 1947 to 2008

This recent article is very interesting because of the facts and figures presented in it. It reviews the latest situation on the current global economic crisis and presents a brief history of the relative state and strength of the labour movement and the top wealthy elite.

History of number of strike days from 1947 - 2008

In this report there are two interesting graphs both of which have been reproduced here. In the first we see the historic number of strike days in the US. As can be seen these are quite high in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and then we have the arrival of Regan in the US and Thatcher in the UK and we see how this assault on labour by these two bureacrats working on behalf of the wealthy elite, launched the fight back and the number of strike days in the years that followed basically collapsed.

This of course was a time of great change with large scale privatisations, collapse of the USSR, and the opening of China. At the same time the wealth gap began opening up and the percentage of wealth owned and controlled by the very top tiny percent of society increased to levels not seen since the depression era in the 1930s.

The second graph shows the first one, but this time overlaid with the income share of the richest one percent of people. In this dramtic graph we can see as the number of strike days went down, their wealth went up and rapidly so in the last 20 years, until the point today where we are all aware of the craven financial power brokers who gambled our colletive entire economies worldwide for their own gain.

As the article: "The economic crisis and the resurgence of class conflict in the United States" points out, we are set for an explosive increase in unrest as it would seem obvious that when you keep something like this repressed for so long, its bound to come back with greater voracity.

Here's a quote where the "gap" is the one in the graph

This gap—which can be defined as a potential “zone of conflict”—has reached dimensions that are not compatible with social “peace.” In terms of social inequality, the United States is now back to where it was in 1929, prior to the Great Depression and the ensuing social upsurge of the working class. There are limits to the ability of the Obama administration and the trade union apparatus to suppress social conflict. The social contradictions of the United States have reached a point where an explosive renewal of the class struggle is unavoidable.

But the coming struggles will not merely repeat the patterns of the past. At the beginning of the year, the SEP stated:

The tasks of the SEP proceed from the logic of the socioeconomic and political crisis of American and world capitalism. The party anticipates that the deepening crisis will lead to the social and political radicalization of the working class in the United States and internationally. This radicalization will find expression in the development of mass struggles that strive to break free of the bureaucratic shackles of the reactionary trade unions and assume an increasingly political and anti-capitalist dimension.

History has once again taken a sharp turn. The past 12 months have witnessed an extraordinary transformation of the objective situation. Mankind is entering into a new period of political upheavals and social struggles, on a world scale, which will decide the fate of humanity. The objective prerequisites for world socialist revolution are emerging with extreme rapidity.....

Correlation between number of strike days and wealth of the top 1%