ABCs of Capitalism and Socialism 9781784787264

Citation preview

Vivek Chibber

The ABCs of Capitalism

Understanding Capitalism

The ABCs of Capitalism Understanding Capitalism By Vivek Chibber

IN THIS SERIES A. Understanding Capitalism B. Capitalism and the State C. Capitalism and Class Struggle

To order individual or bulk copies: jacobinmag.com/store Published by Jacobin Foundation 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

Understanding Capitalism In early 2015 the Gallup Agency polled Americans on what they thought was the most pressing concern for the United States. The winner? A cluster of issues labelled “economic problems,” which at 38 percent, topped all other issues by a factor of more than 2 to 1. If we add concerns such as health care (10 per cent), education (7 percent), and poverty/joblessness (4 percent) — matters of economic welfare were the biggest concern for 60 percent of the respondents.1 A few weeks later, the Pew Charitable Trust queried Americans on their sense of financial security. It found that 50 percent of those polled declared that they felt acutely insecure about their financial situation. An astounding 71 percent declared that they could not pay 1 “Most Important Problem,” accessed March 7, 2015, http://www.gallup.com/ poll/1675/most-important-problem.aspx. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

4

their bills and 70 percent said they did not have enough saved to retire. The feeling of insecurity about their future weighs so heavily on the minds of Americans that a whopping 92 percent said that they would give up economic mobility in exchange for economic security. It is not that the respondents don’t wish for mobility — rather, they view their situation as being so precarious that they would forego future economic gains for a sense of stability here and now.2 Things are not this bad for everyone. In fact, for those at the apex of American society, life has never been so good. For America’s richest families, the last forty years have been something like a nonstop party. Even as incomes have stagnated for the vast majority, the richest 10 percent have gotten richer and fatter. In the United States, 88 percent of all the increase in personal wealth between 1983 and 2016 went to this group, while none went to the bottom 80 percent. If we turn to income growth, about 83 percent of increases in income since 1982 went to the top 10 percent, while the bottom 80 percent only got 8 percent of the total.3 So, even as the economy has gotten better and more efficient since 1980, almost all of the direct benefits have gone to those who were already rich. Any decent person would agree that there is something fundamentally wrong with this situation. How can it be that in a society with such enormous resources and wealth, a thin layer of the population at the top gets to have everything, while millions upon millions experience life as a daily grind, a struggle just to make ends meet? Well, mainstream media and talking heads do have an explanation, and it tends to be of two kinds. The first one places the focus on individuals. It’s exemplified in what Republican presidential 2 Pew Charitable Trust, Americans Financial Stability  — Perception and Reality, March 2015. 3 Edward Wolff, “Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2016: Has Middle Class Wealth Recovered?” NBER Working Paper, November 2017, http:// www.nber.org/papers/w24085. UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

5

candidate Herman Cain said in his 2012 Primary campaign: “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”4 What Cain meant is that the only thing standing between you and a decent life is your willingness to work hard. So if you are in poverty, stuck in a bad job, or simply unemployed, it is because you cannot or will not put in the effort to succeed. You either refuse to put in the hours, or you refuse to accept the wage and the hours that the job comes with. You are either too lazy or too precious. But then, if this is so, of course you have no one to blame but yourself. The second explanation blames the government. The basic idea is that social problems arise because the government keeps interfering in the market, preventing it from functioning the way it is supposed to. If left to itself, the market is both fair and maximally efficient. As long as people want to work, everyone will find a job; if they have special skills, the market will recognize and reward them for it; if they have an idea that will make money, banks will give them the credit to start their own business and become rich. Markets spontaneously tend toward full employment and they reward people for their talents. The problem is that governments won’t leave them alone. Politicians and special interests pile on regulations that squelch entrepreneurial initiative; they launch welfare schemes that get people hooked on welfare; they don’t let goods flow freely across borders, and so on. The solution, therefore, is to get the government out of the economy and let the market do its magic. It’s easy to see that this is the view from the mansion. It is the ideology of the winners, those for whom the system works fantastically well. On this view, if someone is rich it must be because of their hard work, not because they have the advantage of class; their money reflects their skills and talents, not the power they wield

4 “Cain to Protesters: ‘If You Don’t Have a Job and You’re Not Rich, Blame Yourself,” accessed May 26, 2017, http://thehill.com/video/campaign/185671-cain-to-protesters-if-you-dont-have-a-job-and-youre-not-rich-blame-yourself. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

6

The problem is the system, and if we’re going to do anything to make the situation better, it is important to understand how that system works.

over their workers. There is no oppression and no exploitation, only free choice and opportunity. For the last few decades, this explanation for people’s misery didn’t face much of a challenge. For what seemed like a lifetime, it looked like people saw no choice but to hunker down and try to just get through, even if they had doubts about what their TVs and their teachers told them about how society works. The idolatry of the market seemed to drown out every other voice. But in the past few years, it’s become pretty clear that people aren’t buying the message any more. Whereas it seems it was only yesterday that Margaret Thatcher proclaimed there was “no alternative” to the market fundamentalism that she espoused and implemented — that ideology is now in shambles. The signs are everywhere, but most evidently in the explosive success of new leftwing political candidates in the Atlantic world — Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the 2016 Democratic Party Primary in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn’s amazing success in Great Britain, Jean-Luc Melenchon’s garnering of 20 percent of the vote in the first round of the French presidential elections, and the emergence of Podemos in Spain. On the flip side is the significant decline of the traditional parties of the center and the right, from France to Spain and Greece. An “alternative,” to use Thatcher’s language, is exactly what people UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

7

seem to want. In 2015, the most frequently entered query in Google’s search engine was “socialism”! Socialism is back in the air because there is a growing sense among working people that the problems they face aren’t the doing of this or that party or politician, but stem from the way the system itself works. And in fact this intuition on the part of billions of people is correct — the problem is the system, and if we’re going to do anything to make the situation better, it is important to understand how that system works. This is a long essay. It might be useful to summarize in advance what it says. The five big points to take away from it are as follows: 1. Capitalism isn’t just a collection of individuals, but individuals grouped in social classes. People don’t come to the market as individuals competing on a level playing field. They are grouped into different classes and face very different economic conditions. The basic fact that differentiates the people into these classes is whether or not they own their means of production — land, factories, banks, hotels, etc. The vast majority of people don’t. The only way they can survive is by working for those who do own the means of production, called capitalists. So most people in capitalism are simple workers, and they have no choice but to sell their labor effort to capitalists; capitalists, in turn, sell the goods and services that they produce by hiring the workers. Both groups are forced to sell on the market, but what they sell is very different. 2. Capitalists and workers have very different interests. Capitalists are driven to maximize profits. But in order to succeed, they typically have to wage constant war on their own employees. What every employer tries to achieve is to produce as cheaply as possible and to squeeze as much as she can out of her workers for every dollar she gives them. This naturally means CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

8

that each employer tries to keep her employees’ wages as low as she can, while also getting as much work out of them as she can in return. This runs against what workers desire. Whereas the employer wants to keep wages low, the worker wants to set them as high as she can; and while the employer wants to set the pace of work as high as she can, the worker wants to keep it at a reasonable level. But because the employer is the stronger party, workers have to accept the terms, even though it undermines their wellbeing. 3. Capitalists aren’t motivated by greed but by market pressures. Capitalists don’t cause harm to their employees out of malice or greed. Their motivation comes from the brute reality of market competition. If a capitalist doesn’t produce at the lowest price, she knows that she will lose customers, and if that continues, her firm will start bleeding money. So she has to keep her selling price as low as possible. But if she’s going to lower her selling price, she also has to lower her costs, or she won’t make any money. Hence, she tries to pay out as little as possible for her inputs — the machines and raw material that she buys, and the wages she’s paying to her workers. So every capitalist constantly tries to get the most out of every dollar she spends, including from her workers. This is how firms survive in the market. It has nothing to do with greed. 4. This system creates enormous wealth but also great misery for the majority. This is why, even though capitalism creates enormous wealth, its benefits are so lopsided. Workers would be better off if every time productivity went up, it meant higher wages and shorter working days. This doesn’t happen in a free market. Even while productivity is increasing, employers respond by demanding more effort and longer hours. But just as importantly, even as profits go up, there is no guarantee that they’ll UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

9

come back to the employees as higher wages — the employer will prefer to keep the increased profits herself, either to pay out to shareholders, or to reinvest it, or put it in her pocket. This means that even as the economic pie expands, workers don’t necessarily benefit from it. They can be stuck with stagnant wages, job insecurity, long hours, and ill health. If left to its own, the system itself creates enormous wealth for some, and misery for the many. 5. Workers only advance if they act collectively. The reason you get fantastic riches on one side and mass misery on the other is very simple — workers are dependent on their employers, so they have to accept the terms they are offered. The boss gets to call the shots. Even though capitalists and workers need each other, they aren’t equals. Yes, a factory owner has to have workers, and workers need to find a job. It sounds like a good bargain for both. But in fact, the worker will always be more desperate than the employer. She typically has very little savings to tide her over, is living hand to mouth, and knows that if she doesn’t agree to the wage being offered, there are lots of other equally desperate people who will take those terms. What makes her weaker is the fact that she is easily replaced if she turns down the offer. The only solution to this for workers is to make it harder to be replaced if they choose to refuse the employers’ offer, and the only way to consistently do this is by banding together. In other words, individual workers defend their interests by forming collective organizations. This is the lesson they have learned over the course of two centuries, and it is as true today as it was two centuries ago. With this summary as a guidepost for our basic argument, we can work out the details.

CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

10

WHAT IS CAPITALISM? Capitalism is a kind of economic system. It is a particular way of organizing the production of goods and services in a given population. Now, to suggest that capitalism is one way of organizing economic activity implies that it is not the only way of doing so. There have been other kinds of economic systems — two well-known examples are the slave economy of ancient Rome and feudalism in medieval Europe and Asia. So what sets capitalism apart? How do we know it when we see it? The simplest way to identify capitalism is on the basis of something called market dependence. In a capitalist society, the vast majority of people depend on the market to make a living. What this means is that when people try to acquire the basic necessities for their well-being — such as food, clothing and shelter — they have to buy or rent them from someone else. They don’t have the option of making the essentials themselves. A system in which everyone is market-dependent has several important characteristics. 1. All production is carried out for selling on the market, not for self-consumption. What this means is that when producers make something, it is not for their own use. The main aim is the sale of that product to someone else. This has a profound effect on all aspects of production. Those people who organize and carry out economic decisions now have to focus single-mindedly on finding a buyer for their goods. It doesn’t matter if the good or service is something they personally like or have a use for. All that matters is that that someone else finds it desirable and wants to buy it. 2. The labor that goes into production is by people working for a wage. Another way of saying this is that the typical form of employment in capitalism is wage labor. For most of human UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

11

history, most people were self-employed. They worked on their own plots of land as peasants, or in their own establishments as craftsmen. In capitalism, self-employment is the exception, not the rule. What is most common is for people to work for someone else. They work under their employer’s direction, for an agreed-upon amount of time and at an agreed-upon rate of compensation. The most common is an hourly rate, which is called a wage. 3. Productive establishments are privately owned. What this means is that the places that hire wage laborers — like factories, warehouses, restaurants, and hotels — are owned by individuals who have full and exclusive authority over what to do with them. They also have authority over whom to hire, how many people to employ, what to produce, whether or not to expand production, and so on. These owners are called capitalists, and the assets that they own are called capital. These three elements are foundational to a capitalist system. It is important to note that while all three are important, it is really private ownership that gets the ball rolling. Wage labor was present to some extent in many economic systems — it existed in Ancient Rome and in every kind of medieval system in Europe and Asia. It was also very common to have trade and exchange, and, in fact, virtually every society with settled agriculture has had trade both within and outside its boundaries. But in all such cases, wage labor and trade were pretty minor phenomena. People worked for wages, but usually just to supplement what they produced on their own landholdings; there might have been some people who relied mainly on wage labor, but their numbers were small. Similarly, trade has been around for centuries, even millennia, but family units very rarely depended on exchange for their survival. What they took to the market was usually a surplus left over CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

12

after their basic consumption needs had been satisfied. Hence, they didn’t organize their production with the goal of selling on the market. What they made therefore remained geared toward personal consumption. So the mere fact that there exists some wage labor is not evidence of capitalism, nor is the existence of trade and exchange. Both of these phenomena have existed within pre-capitalist economic systems. In capitalism, wage labor and trade have moved to the very center of economic activity. They have become the organizing principles for production and distribution. So trade and wage labor become markers of capitalism when they become the anchors of the entire economy — that is, when they become the means by which production and consumption are carried out. And historically, this only happened once the vast majority of people lost their access to the means of production. Throughout most of human history, the vast bulk of the population lived on the land, and, more importantly, individual families had publically recognized rights to plots of land. As long as they had access to this land, they could produce for themselves — they grew their own crops, produced much of their own articles of consumption, and therefore did not have to rely either on selling on the market or working for a wage. They still participated in market transactions, and they even resorted to wage labor occasionally. But their survival never depended on these activities. They relied on them only to supplement their income and consumption. As long as they had access to the means of production, they could keep market forces at bay in their lives. But once economic actors are stripped of the means of production, once they lose access to land and capital, the conditions for their economic reproduction undergo a sea change. They can no longer rely on their own crops or handicrafts to survive, since they don’t have access to key factors of production. They have to buy their articles of consumption on the market, which means that they have to first find a way of acquiring money in order to purchase them. This UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

13

The very act of creating a class of capitalists and a class of workers spreads the market throughout society.

money comes from working for those few people who now have taken exclusive control over the means of production — the capitalists. Another way of putting all this is that capitalism comes about when a particular kind of class structure is created — in which there is a small group on one side called capitalists, who control the basic means of production; and another group, the vast majority, on the other side, who don’t have any choice but to seek employment from these capitalists. We call the second group the working class. It’s the creation of this class system that brings about complete market dependence for everyone. The very act of creating a class of capitalists and a class of workers spreads the market throughout society. How does that happen? Here’s how. By depriving the bulk of the population of the means of production, two new mass markets have been created simultaneously. First, by forcing the bulk of the population to go out looking for jobs, we have created a market for labor power. Owners of capital wishing to produce a good can now find labor on this newly established labor market. Second, by forcing these wage laborers to purchase their consumption goods on the market, we have created a mass market for those very goods — a market that didn’t exist before, since people relied on their own means of production to feed and clothe themselves. There is now a market for labor and another CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

14

one for the goods that this labor will produce, whereas previously both of these were either very small or non-existent. Hence, what has kept wage labor and market exchange at the margins of economic production throughout most of human history is the absence of private property. And what enables them to take over the economy, to become the drivers of production and consumption decisions, is when one group of people manages to throw the bulk of the population off the land.

IT’S ALL ABOUT PROFITS So now we know that in a capitalist economy most people are distributed into two great classes. Production is controlled by capitalists, who employ workers to produce goods and services. These are sold on the market as commodities. It is from the sale of commodities that both workers and employers derive their income. This is worth examining at a little more length. Karl Marx gave a very intuitive description of the process through which a capitalist goes about their business. Suppose you’re a capitalist with a sum of money that you want to use to start an enterprise. This sum of money is represented by the letter M. With this M, the capitalist then goes out and buys what she needs to produce goods or services — land, machinery, raw materials, and, of course, labor power — produces the commodity, and takes it to the market to sell. The commodities produced are denoted by C. If C is successfully sold, the capitalist is able to recoup the money originally spent on inputs M. This completes the cycle of production. We can represent this as:

M→C→M The M at the end of the production period represents the same sum of money that the employer started with — the original investment. If the employer manages to recoup this amount from sales revenue, UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

15

she is in a position to start a new cycle of production and enter the market again to try her luck. If the original sum M is not recouped and revenues are less than the original value, there will be a drain on the employer’s wealth. So at the very least, the capitalist needs to end up with the money she originally had, if she wants to stay in business. But while it is important for her to recoup her original investment, of course this isn’t all she needs. For one thing, she won’t have made any money herself. For the capitalist to derive an income for herself, there has to be an addition to the original value of M — a surplus over the money she’s paid out to others. We can represent this as ∆M. The ‘∆’ stands for the additional increment she has made over her initial investment — her profit. It is from this profit, the ∆M, that she derives her own income, and also the money with which she can expand her operations, perhaps buy new machinery, etc. So the new M actually needs to be of a greater value than the original one if she wants to do more than just cover her costs. A more accurate way of representing the cycle is therefore as follows:

M → C → M (+∆M) The new increment is hardly a side note. It’s actually the most important part of the production effort. For the capitalist, the whole point of the cycle is to end up with ∆M. If not for that, her entire effort becomes a kind of philanthropic endeavor, in which she pays others, but takes nothing home for herself. The ∆M is the capitalist’s profit, and as everyone knows, it is the pursuit of profit that shapes the entire organization of production in capitalism. We know now what the capitalist is after — the profit. We know that she owns the means of production with which she can acquire it. Once she has her material inputs in hand — the machinery, buildings, raw materials etc. — all she needs is to find labor. If she is operating in a setting where peasants or farmers have not been stripped of their land, this is of course a major stumbling block, since the labor she CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

16

needs will not be available. This is why capitalism requires depriving the bulk of the population of the means of production, so that they have to go out looking for work, and make themselves available to employers. But since we are assuming that this expropriation has been accomplished, then finding a sufficient number of workers on the labor market is rarely a problem. The capitalist now has to do two things. First, she has to get her employees to do the work that is needed to produce the commodity she wishes to sell. She can do this in a couple of different ways. The most typical in advanced industrial countries is by bringing them together under one roof in some kind of productive enterprise — a factory, a workshop, hotel, restaurant, nursing home, warehouse, etc. Here she provides them with the raw materials, tools, machinery, etc. that are needed to make the commodity, and with this, puts them to work. They put these implements to use and at the end of the production period they present her with the commodity she wishes to take to the market. In the case of services, they sell them on site to customers as they come in to purchase them. Either way, the capitalist has to be sure that her employees will provide her with the one thing she needs from them — the requisite labor effort that must go into production of the commodity. The process of acquiring this labor effort from workers, that is, the time during which they are at work producing the good or service, is called the labor process. In advanced capitalist societies, the labor process is supervised by the employer or managers, to ensure that the employees work as hard as the boss needs them to. But in many parts of the world, especially in poorer countries, capitalists hire workers who do not carry out the labor process under one roof. Instead, they work at home, often working as a family and sometimes hiring a small number of workers themselves. This, the second method of production, is a kind of sub-contracting, or contracting out. This is as much a capitalist form of production as the first one, since the basic organizing principles are the same — work is being done by UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

17

workers for a fixed rate, and the products are made for sale, not personal consumption. What is different is just the location of the labor process — it is decentralized instead of being located in one building or set or compound. Now comes the second thing the capitalist needs to do — sell the product. If the sales effort goes as expected, then the initial investment will have paid off and there is profit, the ∆M. The capitalist is now ready to start the process anew, hire the workers back for the next production period, return to the market with a new batch of goods, and maybe earn another round of revenue. It seems simple enough. But as it happens, it is not that simple. What the capitalist typically finds is that the market is nothing like this peaceful fantasy. It is in fact more like a war zone. And the challenges of the market affect every part of the production process, forcing adjustments at every step, from buying inputs to marketing.

THE PRESSURE OF COMPETITION What turns the market into something like a war zone is the fact of competition. When capitalists try to sell their product, they find one of two things. The most common is that they are not the only ones trying to market that particular commodity. There are other capitalists also trying to do the same, bringing their own goods for sale and hoping to recoup their own investments, just like the particular capitalist we happen to be following. An auto maker finds other automobiles also being sold, a hotel manager finds other hotels vying for customers, and textile producers have to contend with other manufacturers desperate to market their own product. And since they are all vying for the same consumers, they have to find a way of drawing the consumers toward their commodities and hence away from those being sold by others. A second possibility is that the capitalist might not initially find competitors already on the market. She might be so lucky as to be CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

18

The drive to minimize wage costs while maximizing work extraction is the essence of how capital relates to labor.

the only producer of the good in question, and hence able to make easy sales at a high price. Her rate of return on her investment will probably rise to a level other capitalists in other sectors can only dream of. But this state of affairs is unlikely to last very long. The very fact that she has it so good, and is able to make a very high rate of return, inevitably will draw the attention of other capitalists. And when they are about to start their next cycle of production, with their money in hand, they will pause. They will compare the return they are likely to get in their own line of production with the higher one in the sector where our capitalist is the lone producer. The decision will very likely be to enter this high-profit sector so that they may also tap into the stream of easy profits that our capitalist is making. Or alternatively, it won’t be capitalists from other sectors who enter the line but capitalists looking for a first-time investment, just like our capitalist did when she decided to enter the line as lone producer. Either way, the ‘sole producer’ status doesn’t last very long. The point here is that, sooner or later, most every capitalist finds that if she wants to make her profits, it will have to come through winning the competitive battle. The sales effort thus becomes a highly fraught affair, in which the main goal is not just to find customers to buy a good, but to make them buy it from her instead of from someone else. The most important way to achieve this is by UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

19

lowering the selling price of the good, so that it is cheaper than the one being sold by competitors. Competition is thus carried out mainly through the reduction of prices. This price competition should be understood in one of two ways — either as selling the same quality good at a lower price, or as selling a better quality good at the same price. Either way, the seller is offering the customer a better bargain for their money. But this is where the profound impact of competition becomes clear. The pressure to lower the selling price creates an immediate problem for the capitalist. If she keeps lowering her price to attract more customers, it means she is also reducing her profit margin. This is because while her selling price has gone down, her costs have not. It still costs the same amount to make the goods — she still has to pay her rent, pay back any loans she took out, all the raw material costs are the same and so is the wage bill. And if her profit margin keeps shrinking, it could end up threatening the very survival of her enterprise. There will soon come a point where she is unable to pay for her inputs or where her profit is so low that it doesn’t make sense to stay in that particular line any more. She will think about closing shop and finding other investments for her money. If she is to stay in this product line, or stay solvent, she has to find a way out of this squeeze on her profits. She has to restore profitability.

THE COMPULSION TO MINIMIZE COSTS The only way for a capitalist to maintain her profit margin while cutting her selling price is by reducing her costs. There are two dimensions to this. The first is the most obvious — when she goes out to buy machines, or find a building to rent, or to hire labor, she will choose the cheapest option that is available. She can’t afford to be extravagant. But of course, not being extravagant doesn’t mean that you buy garbage, just because it’s cheap. You have to make sure that whatever inputs you get are also efficient and productive. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

20

This is the second dimension to cost reduction. The inputs have to be the cheapest ones available, but which will also give back a decent return, by performing up to standards set by the competition. There’s no point buying a cheap machine if it keeps breaking down; it doesn’t help to locate into a low-rent building if it doesn’t have a reliable power supply; and low-wage workers don’t help if they just stand around all day or lack the needed skills. What the capitalist needs is not the cheapest inputs per se, but the best bargain. What makes the inputs a bargain is not just how much they cost but also how much output they provide in return. So the capitalist has to make sure that she is doing two things at the same time — spending as little as she can, while getting the most out of every dollar that she spends. This has a very important implication for how she relates to her workers. She doesn’t just want the cheapest machine, but the machine that produces the most at the cheap price. So too, she doesn’t just want to pay very little in wages, but also to get the most output from the workers at that wage. The capitalist wants to maximize the effort that her workers give her, at whatever wage she is paying them, and with whatever machines she has them working. The problem is there is no way to specify the quantity and quality of the effort a worker is going to provide to her employer. When a capitalist hires her labor, the agreement is over two things — how long they will work, and how much money they will get for it. The agreement is over the labor time. The employer pays the worker for her time, and then hopes — or tries to ensure — that the effort expended by that laborer is up to the standard set by the market. Unfortunately for her, this is not so easy. First, she can’t be sure that the worker will be as committed to this goal as she is. The worker might not want to work at the rate her employer prefers. She might prefer a more leisurely pace. The worker might even feel that the pace of work her boss is demanding can actually be harmful to her. UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

21

The gap between productivity and a typical worker’s compensation has increased dramatically since 1917. 250

200

Cumulative Percent Change Since 1948

150

100

50 1948 ­­­­‒ 1973 Productivity: 96.7% Hourly Comp: 91.3% 0 1950

1960

1970

Note: Data are for compensation (wages and benefits) of production/nonsupervisory workers in the private sector and net productivity of the total economy. “Net productivity” is the growth of output of goods and services less depreciation per hour worked.

CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

22

FIGURE 1 — GROWTH IN PRODUCTIVITY AND HOURLY COMPENSATION, 1948– 2016

241.8%

Productivity 115.14%

Hourly Compensation

1973 ‒ 2016 Productivity: 73.7% Hourly Comp: 12.3%

1980

1990

2000

2010

Source: EPI analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Updated from Figure A in Raising America’s Pay: Why It’s Our Central Economic Challenge, Economic Policy Institute.

UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

23

Second, the pace of work demanded by the employer can itself keep changing. What was an acceptable pace of work to the employer last month will not be so today, because a rival found a way of driving her workers harder, or maybe bought a new machine that lowers her costs. This sends every other capitalist scrambling to find new ways of economizing, and of getting more out of their own labor force. The goal posts, as it were, keep shifting. So just as workers get habituated to one pace of work, the order comes down that it wasn’t enough. They now have to work harder, or faster, than they were last month. So capitalists have to treat their employees’ effort as a variable — something that can’t be predicted, and which they have to constantly find new ways of increasing. It’s a variable because when they hire the workers, they don’t have full knowledge of how much the worker is capable of delivering, and they have no real confidence in how much effort she will be willing to offer. This creates a constant struggle between them, so that the labor process becomes a battleground between workers and management. The drive to minimize wage costs while maximizing work extraction is the essence of how capital relates to labor. Across the economy, regardless of product line or economic sector, the basic dynamic is the same. A capitalist who manages to get her labor force to work faster, harder, and better will have ended up with a much better bargain than one whose workers are less careful or not expending as much effort. She doesn’t drive her workers because she is greedy, but because someone else might beat her to it and end up having an advantage on the market. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all workers are reduced to working for starvation wages. In different sectors, the wage level differs with the level of productivity. The point isn’t that workers in every sector end up with the same wage; it is that in every sector, workers are forced to submit to the same pressure, and the wages they get are kept as low as the market will allow.

CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

24

Two very important implications follow from this. First, the relentless pressure to keep down wages while also getting the most work out of their employees pits employers against their workers. Another way of putting this is that capitalists and workers end up having very different interests, since, obviously, workers would rather have the highest wages they can get for themselves and keep to a humane work schedule. When the boss tells them to increase the output per hour, it means more fatigue; when she tells them to take shorter breaks, it means more drudgery or more stress; when she doesn’t give them a raise for years at a time, it means that they are essentially handing over to her all the gains from their greater efficiency. The boss’ gain is coming at their expense — hence, they have different interests. But this is where the second important fact comes in — even though workers might have different priorities than their employers, it’s the employer who is able to set the basic terms. Or to put it differently, it’s the employer’s interests that typically win out. This is because she is the more powerful party of the two. She has the power to hire and fire — and the worker is rarely in a position to afford losing her job. When we put these two facts together, we see the roots of one of the most basic facts about capitalism — even though workers and capitalists work together to produce their firm’s revenue, how they go about doing it and how the benefits are distributed, is decided by the bosses. And this enables capitalists to set the terms of work in a way that they reap the gains of economic growth, while labor’s vulnerability forces it to absorb most of the costs. Employers’ power to hire and fire enables them to organize work in such a way that the benefits come to them, while employees are forced to adjust their lives around the demands of work. The result is vast wealth and power for one side, with stagnant incomes, insecurity, overwork, and collapsing health for the other. Let’s see how this works out in three critical areas — income distribution, economic insecurity, and the pace and duration of work.

UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

25

INCOME DISTRIBUTION The most obvious way in which employers benefit at the expense of workers is in how the gains from production are shared. The basic structure of employment in capitalism is that employers offer jobs at a certain wage, and employees are free to take that offer or refuse it. But while this seems like a fair bargaining situation between two parties, in this case the transaction is between two very unequal sides. People looking for jobs are doing so because they don’t have enough to live on. They enter the labor market with little or no savings to fall back on. Employers, on the other hand, are by definition holders of wealth, typically with a healthy income flow, and also able to secure credit and loans if they need it. So the bargaining situation is between one person (the worker) who is desperate for an income, and another (the employer) who already has a stock of wealth at her disposal. Obviously, the employer is in a much stronger position than the worker. This inequality in leverage means that employers are able to set the terms of the employment contract to massively favor them over their employees. They are able to demand that they get the lion’s share of the income that their firm generates. Workers are free to refuse this deal, of course — but at the cost of risking unemployment. So the choice for them is between settling for an unfair bargain, or having no income at all. This imbalance between the two groups is profoundly important. The greater power enjoyed by capitalists enables them to get income over and above what they would get if they were on a more equal footing with workers. And this means that income includes a component that, in an important sense, is extorted from the workers — it’s a kind of blackmail made possible by worker’s desperation. Hence, a big reason why workers’ share of income is low is because part of what could have come to them ends up in capitalists’ pockets, through this extortion. But if this is so, then it’s fair to say that capitalists’ soaring incomes are that high at least in part because workers’ incomes are low. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

26

It is sometimes claimed that, even though it is regrettable that employers claim the lion’s share of income, it is worth it because they reinvest that income. The reinvestment results in faster growth, and this growth results in rising incomes for workers too. Hence, as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. But the last half-century has shown that there is no reason to expect such an outcome. Whether or not workers share in productivity increases depends a great deal on building their bargaining power against employers. Without it, the income gains go straight to the bosses. The history of wage growth in the United States shows this very clearly. In figure 1 we can see that post-war US history can be divided into two distinct periods. The first, stretching from 1945 to the early 1970s, witnessed a steady growth in wages, pretty much in line with productivity growth. This means that as US firms became more productive and brought in more revenue, wages went up right along with it. But this changed in the mid-1970s. From 1973 to 2016, productivity went up by 74 percent, while wages only increased by 12.5 percent. Where did the rest of it go? Into the hands of owners and ceos. There are two essential points here. First and most importantly, it explodes the myth that if we tolerate the build-up of huge inequalities, the benefits will “trickle down” to the workers. In fact there is nothing to guarantee such an outcome. Unless workers have some way of redirecting some of the income stream toward themselves, their bosses will use their greater power to grab it and use it as they see fit. This brings up the second point — the main reason there was a break in income growth was that there was a decline in workers’ bargaining power. The years during which wages rose in tandem with productivity was also the era during which unions had a foothold in the workplace. After the explosion of industrial unrest in the mid1930’s, trade unions finally were granted legal backing, enabling millions of workers to organize and bargain collectively around wages and work conditions — for the first time in American history. UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

27

Employers now had to negotiate the terms of employment, rather than setting them unilaterally. And the result was several decades of rising wages and growing incomes for workers. What was happening here was that workers were forcing employers to share some of the fruits of increasing revenue, and employers had to concede because unions had the power to shut down production if the bosses refused. But by the middle of the 1970s, the power of unions was weakened to the point where they weren’t able to exert the pressure needed to redirect revenues to their members. Membership continued to decline, and by the 1980s it had fallen from its peak of almost a third of the labor force in the 1950s, to around 10 percent. Private sector workers were once again at their employers’ mercy. Profits continued to grow in the 1990s, but instead of being funneled into higher wages, that money now went to the owners and managers of capital. As the balance of power between labor and capital changed, so did the distribution of income. Or, to put it in the language of the famous metaphor, the tide continued to rise, but it only lifted the boats belonging to the rich. The poor were left to swim for their survival.

ECONOMIC INSECURITY At the very core of employers’ power over workers is job insecurity. We have seen that the reason workers accept the lopsided wage bargain is that they have little choice: they are told to either take the job as it is offered or risk starvation. This threat is effective only because working people have no way of getting access to the basic necessities of life, except through the labor market. Finding and keeping a job is the only way they can live. And both of these goals — finding a job and then keeping it — depends entirely on the whims of those who control the means of production, the class of employers. Libertarians often say that while it’s true that bosses can fire workers, workers can also “fire” their boss — by simply walking away from the job. But this is highly misleading. It’s true that a worker is CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

28

free to leave her job — she isn’t owned by the employer, nor is she typically indentured to her. But this formal freedom to walk away has very little significance, unless the worker has some other source of income on which she can exit. Where would this come from? They don’t own plots of land, or their own businesses, or have huge stock portfolios to fall back on. That’s why they go out looking for work. They can seek out another job, but of course every job will have a similar power imbalance between them and their employer. Plus, there is no guarantee that they will find a job at all. So the rational move is for them to stick it out — to try holding on to this job. The workers’ baseline insecurity is built into the system in two ways. First, the very existence of capitalism presumes that the vast majority of the people don’t have access to the means of production. This is what we have been examining thus far in our discussion — the natural state of desperation in which most people live. The second mechanism that builds insecurity into the system is the process of economic growth itself. Growth in capitalism comes about as capitalists find ways of increasing their efficiency and productivity so they can sell at a lower price and expand their market share. Increasing productivity is the name of the game. But as firms become more productive, they find that they can produce more with fewer workers. It now takes fewer workers to make the same number of goods, precisely because productivity has gone up. Employers engaging in this kind of investment therefore typically react by also laying off part of their labor force, throwing them back on the job market. This is why the system never runs out of labor. You might wonder why it doesn’t: after all, in a growing economy, job opportunities are always expanding, and at some point the number of people looking for jobs should run out. The reason it doesn’t is that, even as people are being sucked up into new jobs, the growth process itself is also throwing masses of employees back onto the labor market. The very process that generates growth — the increasing labor productivity — also replenishes the pool of labor for that expansion to continue. UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

29

Marx called the workers who were constantly thrown back onto the labor market the reserve army of labor; it is a kind of labor reserve, waiting to be sucked up into employment as capitalists need them. What this means, in essence, is that capitalism not only depends on the creation of mass insecurity, but reproduces that very insecurity as part of its lifeblood. Or, to put it differently, precarious employment is built into the system. It is the natural state for workers: they hold on to their jobs only at the pleasure of their employers. And for most of the history of capitalism, the duration of tenure of a typical job has been very short. Job insecurity is especially acute in many parts of the Global South, mainly because people from rural areas are still flocking to cities looking for jobs. Capitalism constantly throws workers out on the labor market through the process we just described — through the ongoing productivity increases, the introduction of new machinery and more capital-intensive production techniques, and so forth. But in regions where there is a large agricultural sector, there is also the constant influx of migrants who come to the city because they don’t have their agricultural plots anymore. Sometimes this is because they have lost their land; other times they just come to the city looking for a higher income. But as they enter urban areas, they add to the reserve army of labor.

A baseline level of insecurity is forced onto workers by capitalism, all the time, everywhere, regardless of country or region. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

30

The availability of so much cheap labor is a boon to employers in obvious ways. One very important option that it provides them is to never have to commit to long-term employment contracts with their employees, because there are literally dozens of applicants willing to work for a pittance for most jobs. Even in occupations where there have tended to be longer employment contracts, like auto, steel and rubber, recent years have seen a turn to contract labor hired on a short-term basis. The result is that in poorer countries with still large agrarian sectors, job insecurity is much deeper and the scramble by workers to hold on to whatever job they have is much more intense. This is especially true because social welfare programs like unemployment benefits, free healthcare, and old age pensions are quite uncommon. The job becomes the only means of sustenance, even for short spells. And this, in turn, massively increases employers’ bargaining power. Even in advanced industrial countries, the situation has deteriorated in the recent past. First of all, the decline in unions has allowed employers to shift from long-term contracts to short ones. For decades, unions fought for, and won, restrictions on employers’ unilateral power to hire and fire. They pushed hard to restrict firms’ reliance on temporary or short-term workers, and in so doing shifted the balance toward more long-term employment, and, with it, greater benefits to workers. Of course, employers never stopped trying to recapture their power, and as the unions’ influence declined in much of the Western world in the 1980s and 90s, so did the proportion of “good jobs.” This turn in the labor market was made worse by the more general slowing down of the economy since the early 2000s, so that the chances of new jobs opening up tended to get weaker due to slow growth. In other words, job growth became very anemic. Hence, the spells between jobs became longer for workers who were laid off, making the sense of insecurity all the more acute. Finally, the actual size of the reserve army increased massively when the countries of the Eastern Bloc transitioned to capitalism UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

31

in the 1990s. Workers who had not been part of the European labor market were now thrown onto it — sometimes directly as with the reunification of Germany, or indirectly, as with the formation of the European Union, which vastly increased labor migration on the Continent, flooding Western European labor markets with new entrants from the East. All these changes have made workers across the Western world start to feel a lot like their peers in the South — overcome with a sense that their well-being has become fragile, that their future is up in the air. None of this is accidental. A baseline level of insecurity is forced onto workers by capitalism, all the time, everywhere, regardless of country or region. What has happened in the recent past is that institutions that had temporarily acted to decrease that insecurity are being taken apart. They are being dismantled by forces that seek to restore the status quo, because they benefit from it. Their actions are motivated by the logic of capitalism itself. And in poorer countries, the very expansion of capitalism has ripped rural communities apart, throwing peasants and farmers into urban labor markets, adding to the global reserve army, and pitting them against one another in a brutal fight for basic survival. This is the “free market” for billions of people.

THE PACE AND DURATION OF WORK Material inequality and insecurity are both built into the capitalist economy. A third harm comes from the drive to get the most work for as little as possible. There are two basic ways in which employers try to squeeze out more work from their labor force: by getting them to work longer, but also, paradoxically, by underwork. Overwork: The first strategy is to get each worker to work harder, faster, and also longer. This makes most sense when workers are paid a daily wage. It was a fairly common form of payment in the nineteenth century, when workers were given a fixed sum of money per CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

32

day for their work. It is also used today in certain economic sectors like agriculture and construction. Having paid them for the “day”, employers then have every reason to make that “day” as long as possible. If the worker is paid by the week, or perhaps monthly — as in cases where they are paid salaries — the duration of work per day is often left unspecified. In these instances, having spent the money, the employer will typically get her money’s worth by extending the duration of each working day as much as possible, and stretching the working week into the weekend. A less obvious way of increasing the duration of work can be found in sectors where workers are paid by the hour. But it is also more common, since hourly wages are today the most common method of payment. This method is not to extend the working day or week, but the working hour. How can a fixed quantity of time, like an hour, be extended? Well, in the typical workplace, it is rarely the case that employees are actively working every minute of every hour. There is usually some amount of “down time” that is expected by the employees and hence absorbed by the employer. This could be in the form of time for bathroom breaks, lunch, or just a pause in work. The fact that there is some portion of every hour that is not delivering labor means that the actual working time is shorter than the amount of time that the employee is at work. This amounts to a gap, a hole in the working day, which the employer then tries to fill up with actual work. In the US, this is what has happened in many sectors as unions have gotten weaker. In the auto industry, the shift was from a “50-minute hour” in the 1960s to something close to a “57-minute hour” by 2000. This amounts to a prolongation of the working day, even as the nominal length of the day remains the same. These examples are all ways of getting employees to work longer. The second technique for extracting more work is by getting them to work faster. The goal here is to ratchet up the intensity of labor. Suppose employees in a textile factory produce 100 shirts a day, with the day being eight hours. Increasing the intensity of work means that, UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

33

with the same machines and in the same eight hours, they would be goaded into producing a greater number of shirts, say 120. There are many ways to increase production, but in cases of this kind, it is by getting the workers to do exactly what they were doing before, only more speedily. In the twentieth century, when the working day was mandated to have a definite limit of eight hours, the most common way of getting more work out of employees was by this method — by getting them to work harder and faster, since the option of getting them to work longer was substantially curtailed. Indeed, whenever there has been any success in shortening the length of the working day, the response by capitalists has been to compensate by trying to increase the intensity of work. Underwork: But the harm that the profit motive does to workers doesn’t just come from overwork. It also comes from underwork. We often think of employers as making two basic decisions: hiring workers and then keeping them on the job, or firing them if they are not needed. But there is also an in-between status: keeping workers hired but working them irregularly. In sectors like retail, employers find that they can’t anticipate what their workforce requirements will be day to day, because the flow of business is unpredictable. If they have too many workers in the store, and the flow of customers is thin, they end up paying their workers even though they are not actually needed at the time. In technical terms, wages shift from being a variable cost to a fixed cost for that duration. What employers seek is to have the freedom to call in or send home the labor as they see fit — day to day, week to week — so that they can turn wages back into a variable cost. For employers, this creates flexibility. For workers, it means that their schedule might go from, say, twenty hours one week, to seven in the next, to perhaps thirty-five the next, and then zero the week after. The result is twofold. First, for millions of workers, it means that having a job isn’t enough to make ends meet, because it only

CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

34

gives them a few hours of paid work over the month. They have to switch to a portfolio approach, juggling two or three jobs at a time, so that when they are not getting enough hours at one venue, they can seek more hours at another. But this very strategy is undercut by the second result of underwork — the problem that workers can’t plan their weekly schedule because they don’t know when they will be called in at any particular establishment. And since they can’t be sure when they will be asked to come to work at one place, they can’t be sure when they will be able to make themselves available to the other. And this in turn makes it hard to hold on to a job, or even acquire one, because every employer wants her labor to be available when she needs it. The second result of underwork is that the worker’s entire existence is now swallowed up by the needs of her employer. With normal work, at fixed hours and a predictable schedule, employees not only know when they work, but as a result, also know when they do not. This has the enormously important consequence of allowing them to plan for activities outside of their employment that are essential to their physical and emotional well-being — entertainment, time with their friends and family, even vacations. But when work is not only unpredictable, but also so meager that the struggle to acquire it overtakes all other priorities, it means that the very idea of free time, as

The mainstream promise — that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will make it to the top — is simply a lie. The rules are what create the misery. UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

35

truly free, simply disappears. Never knowing when they will be called to work, employees can’t afford to plan for any activity that might make them unavailable. They can’t plan family trips, or take a day or two to go out of town; even going to see a film is nerve-wracking. The line between work time and free time is thus obliterated. When you combine the effects of under-work with those of overwork, what become clear is that the tendency of an unconstrained capitalism is to erase the distinction between work time and free time. The unceasing drive to extract maximal value from labor at work has a direct impact on the quality of time workers spend away from work. On one side, when it results in fatigue or injury, time at home that could be spent developing other talents, or being with friends, or learning new skills, now has to be devoted to simple recuperation — recovering from injuries, trying to reduce tension, etc. In the other case, when there isn’t enough work and the employee doesn’t know when or even if she will be called in, she can’t take the risk of indulging in other activities because she can’t risk being unavailable when her employer needs her. Hence, in capitalism, even workers’ time away from work is directly colonized by the workplace and its demands.

THE RULES ARE THE PROBLEM The preceding discussion helps us understand why capitalism can create such enormous wealth and luxury, but still leave millions upon millions struggling to stay above water. When it comes to the basic conditions of their lives — how much money they have, their basic economic security, and how much they get to work — most people have no control over them. Even more, the decisions about them are made by people who have a direct interest in limiting workers’ security on all these matters. And the incentive to limit this security is built into the system. It is the natural outcome of the profit-maximizing strategy pursued by every firm. Capitalists don’t undermine CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

36

their employees’ wellbeing because they are mean, greedy or callous. They do it because this is how they keep themselves afloat, and how they grow. As long as firms compete on the market, their owners and managers will be punished if they don’t squeeze the most out of their labor force. So they do what they have to, and its most natural result is that their profits come at considerable cost to their employees. This is why the mainstream promise — that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will make it to the top — is simply a lie. The rules are what create the misery. The basic set-up of capitalism is simple — you show up for work every day, work hard, and do what you’re told. The promise is that if you abide by these rules, you will be rewarded with the good life. And this promise is based on a very simple premise — that there is a link between effort and reward. If you work hard, the hard work will pay off. But the secret to capitalism is that there is no reliable connection between effort and reword. The people who work in nursing homes, or fast food, or Amazon warehouses, or in hotel kitchens — they create massive profits for their employers. But they not only see very little of it in their wages, they also have to deal with chronic job insecurity and terrible hours. They are playing by the rules. But the rewards are going to the employer, not to them. This is a basic fact about capitalism, and it is built into the system. It is the natural condition of an economic system in which the bulk of the population is given a simple choice — “work for what we offer you, or go without a job”. What determines people’s economic fate in capitalism is not their effort, but their power. And employers always have more power than workers.

CHANGING THE RULES Another way of summarizing everything we have said so far is this: capitalism systematically generates injustice. Most every modern theory of justice agrees that a humane society is only possible if people are granted basic material necessities and the freedom to UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

37

set their own goals and priorities. People need to have basic material security and the freedom to choose how they spend their time and energy. This doesn’t mean that they have to be free of all constraint. In any large social system, people will have to accept some limits to their freedom and their social choices. But the authority to which they submit has to be accountable, has to be deemed legitimate, and can’t be used to undermine the well-being of subordinate groups. But this is exactly what capitalism does — it consigns the vast majority to insecurity and arbitrary authority. The employment contract is, in its essence, a surrender of autonomy to the boss. This means that workers agree to do what they’re told while at the job — they lose control over how they work, how fast its pace is, when to come in and leave, when to take a bathroom break, etc. Workers give up their autonomy over key aspects of their wellbeing for the eight or ten hours that they are at work. But they also have little or no say in how much they are paid for that work. What all this means is that, in capitalism, being a worker means making a trade — giving up your freedom over vast areas of your life to an employer, both inside and outside the workplace, in exchange for employment. Now, the simple fact of being under someone else’s authority isn’t itself objectionable. Think of a family. Parents have near total authority over their children, encompassing every aspect of their lives. But we don’t typically object to this because we assume that parents will use that power to the benefit of their kids. In the case of the employment relation, however, employers aren’t motivated by their employees’ wellbeing. Their motivation is to maximize profits and minimize costs. Employees’ interests are not part of the consideration. Indeed, as we have seen, profit maximization typically comes at the cost of employee interests. Hence, from the workers’ standpoint, this is nothing other than being subjected to an arbitrary authority. They have no control over the boss’s power, and that power is often used in ways that undermine their wellbeing. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

38

This is how capitalism breeds injustice. And that is also why it generates resistance. Employees resent having to take whatever wage their boss is willing to give them; they hate being pushed around while at work; they chafe at the fact that they work hard, but can’t be sure if they will still have a job tomorrow, and so on. So they try to fight back, to get a better deal for themselves. The most common means toward this is on an individual basis. This is only natural, since they compete on the labor market individually and are hired on an individual basis. Everything about the job encourages them to act on their own. So what means does the lone worker have at her disposal? The ultimate weapon is to threaten to walk away — to quit unless the employer offers her a better deal. And for some workers, this can be effective. But it only works if that worker is hard to replace — if she has a very scarce skill, is exceptionally able, or is especially valuable in some other way. If this is the case, then the boss will probably have to relent and at least consider the demands from this employee. But another way a worker can resist is not by demanding more, but by offering less. So, instead of walking into her boss’s office and insisting on a slower pace of work or shorter hours, she can simply decide to work slower; or to take as many sick days as she can get away with; or to not work as carefully as demanded — in other words, to shirk, and thereby to reclaim some of her time. In more extreme cases, she can take out her frustrations by actively sabotaging the workplace — this is where the expression “throwing a wrench in the works” comes from. But all of these methods are either minimally effective, or effective for only a few lucky employees. So, while the boss will probably offer the highly skilled employee a better deal, the fact is that the vast majority of workers are easily replaceable. So if the typical employee strolls into her boss’s office and threatens to quit, she will simply find herself out of a job. And while it is certainly possible for the individual worker to shirk in some way, if she does so for any period of time without getting her colleagues to join in, her actions UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

39

will be very visible, she will be easy to spot, and she too will soon be on the street. Hence, for the vast majority of people working for a wage, or even for a salary, individual level solutions are simply not an option. They remain stuck in their jobs, have to settle for the wage they’re offered, accept the schedule they’re given and show up every day to do it all over again. The reason is as simple as it is obvious — it is easy to replace one disgruntled employee, or even five or ten. The only viable solution is a collective one. The most direct avenue is through organizations that enable collective action. Workers find that making demands individually isn’t feasible because one employee is easy to replace. But replacing ten is harder and a hundred harder still. When one worker labors at a slower pace, it’s called shirking. When a thousand do it, it’s a job action. And while the one can be punished, the thousand have to be negotiated with. It is this simple fact that inspired the modern labor movement in the early nineteenth century and has not only kept it alive, but at the center of every successful effort at improving the situation of working people in every corner of the world. Even today, we have not found any better vehicle for defending the wellbeing of poor and working people than trade unions, because unions are still the most effective means of collective action. The other way in which workers have been able to find collective solutions is more indirect — through state policy and protection. Instead of getting basic goods by negotiating for more money with the boss, they can acquire them as social rights, from the state. Take the example of health care. Most workers can’t afford decent medical care on the market because it is too expensive. One solution is to rely on a union to demand higher wages, or to demand that the employer pay into a medical plan. But another route is to push for a national health service, like there is in much of Europe, which offers medical care as a right — paid not by the patient at the point of consumption, but by the state from its tax revenues. This can be extended to many other essential goods — child care, housing, education, etc. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

40

Both of these strategies have this in common — they reject the idea that people’s fate should be left to how well they do on the labor market. In other words, they refuse to let the market determine our lives. They insist that people have to come before profits. And so the Left has always tried to build organizations of labor, fight for economic goods as rights, not as privileges, and build social institutions that deepen those rights. But it’s not a simple task. Precisely because these institutions are based on labor’s greater power, and because they end up weakening the power of capital, any such movement immediately triggers a response from the ruling class. Always and everywhere, employers and the wealthy have resisted attempts by the poor to create institutions for more economic justice. So the next question is, how do we get there from here? How can we create institutions that advance the basic interests of working people? These are questions that we take up in the next pamphlets in this series.

UNDERSTANDING CAPITALISM

41

$5.00

Vivek Chibber

Capitalism and the State

The ABCs of Capitalism

The ABCs of Capitalism Understanding Capitalism By Vivek Chibber

IN THIS SERIES A. Understanding Capitalism B. Capitalism and the State C. Capitalism and Class Struggle

To order individual or bulk copies: jacobinmag.com/store Published by Jacobin Foundation 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

Capitalism and the State Capitalism is a system based on a fundamental economic inequality — a small proportion of the population controls the means of production, while most of the remaining population is forced to work for them. This inequality in wealth in turn generates massive inequalities in income — because they control the means of production, employers demand that they get to take home the lion’s share of the income that their firms produce. Capitalists rely on their property rights to grab most of the revenue that their establishments create. This is a kind of systematic extortion. Basically, capitalists tell workers, “If you want to work for us, you’ll have to accept our terms. If you don’t like it, try living without a job.” For their part, the workers end up accepting the bargain because a bad job is better than no job at all. But they agree to much more than that. They also accept that, while they are at work, they will CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

4

hand over much of their personal liberty to the boss — to decide how fast they will work, when they will eat, how much they can move around, who they talk to, what clothes they wear, etc. The power over the terms of employment gives capitalists an enormous degree of control over workers’ basic wellbeing. Their investment determines how many jobs are created, they choose who has those jobs and who doesn’t; they set the pace of work; they control who gets promoted and who doesn’t, etc. … and it’s the workers who have to adjust. Since they are forced to constantly adjust their priorities to decisions made by their bosses, workers’ lives tend to revolve around one main issue — the job. All this is just another way of saying that, in our economic system, capitalists get to set the terms on which most everyone else lives. The modern labor movement has used every possible channel to reduce employers’ unchecked power, and also to find ways of counteracting it. One such avenue has been the democratic state. After all, the state is supposed to be the guardian of the general interest. So if capitalists call the shots in the economy, maybe governments can help to even the scales by coming down on the side of the workers — by passing laws that limit employer abuse, and taxing and spending in a way that improves workers’ bargaining position. This expectation was why labor movements everywhere fought for poor people to have the right to vote. And it was also why capitalists and the wealthy more generally fought against it; both sides expected that if workers got the vote, they would use their numbers to elect politicians who would soak the rich. In some ways, the workers’ hope has been fulfilled. Democracy has been a definite boon to the poor. Democratic states do protect workers’ interests more than oligarchies or dictatorships do. And yet, it remains true that poor people don’t have real political power. Even though a Rockefeller has the same number of votes as anyone who works for him, and even though his workers have the numbers, somehow his political influence is infinitely greater than CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

5

that of his workers. Even though democracy has tamed the class bias of the state, the basic thrust of state policy is nevertheless decidedly in favor of the rich. It is still fundamentally their state. In the advanced industrial world, nowhere is this more apparent than in the United States, and never has it been clearer than over the past generation. We are living in a new Gilded Age, in which an immense concentration of wealth has grown together with the concentration of political power. This pamphlet analyzes the sources of state bias. We need to understand why, far from counteracting the power of capital, states tend to reinforce it. We need to recognize the structural forces that bind it to capitalist interests, even though capitalists’ small numbers should be a disadvantage in a democratic system.

A NEUTRAL STATE? There is a basic and powerful intuition behind the view that in a capitalist democracy, even while the economy is under capitalist control, the state doesn’t have to be. State policy is created by parties and politicians, and politicians are elected into office on the number of votes they can garner. The vote of the richest person isn’t worth any more than that of the poorest. And better yet, the poor vastly outnumber the rich. Not only does this equalize the playing field between rich and poor, it might even tilt it in favor of the poor — because in a democracy, it is numbers that matter. A rational politician would be foolish to pander to capitalists since they can only amount to a few tens of thousands of votes, whereas workers number in the millions. So, if a party really wants to be a political force, the sensible thing for it would be to listen to the largest of the interest groups out there, which is not the capitalists. The political theory that best embodies this view is called pluralism. Pluralism holds that in a democracy, the race for votes neutralizes the power of any particular group in society. If we assume CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

6

that politicians are basically interested in being elected — certainly a reasonable assumption — then they will bend to whichever group comes together to offer up the largest number of votes. So if workers can organize their votes into a cohesive bloc, they can exert decisive influence over politics. But not just workers, any interest group can exert power, as long as it can get its act together and prove that it can deliver votes: religious groups, ethnic minorities, the elderly, women, students, etc. All these are potential interest groups, and parties will slice and dice the voting public into whichever collection of interest groups can carry them to power. Pluralism is and has been the most influential theory of the state for quite some time. Notice that it turns on two key premises: first, no group is more important than another in the influence game; and second, the state is ex ante neutral. We have already introduced the first of these two premises: when we say that any interest group can win in the influence game, it amounts to saying that no group has a necessary advantage over any other. Which group wins depends on the skills of the group’s representatives in making their case, organizing others into a viable electoral or lobbying force, cobbling together a coalition with other groups, and, of course, making a case to the wider public. All these factors go into deciding which interest group wields influence. And the skills that go into this are generally

When the poor have policy preferences that conflict with those of the rich, the chances that the policies of the poor are passed go down to around zero CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

7

available to everyone. Hence, no particular interest group has an advantage over any other. The second premise is also implicit in the story just told. If it is true that any interest group can potentially win the influence game, it implies that the state is also willing to be influenced by anyone. State managers — presidents, legislators, and high level bureaucrats — are open to suggestions. They listen to actors who are persuasive and, more importantly, seem to command real influence. This is rational for them because, again, politics is ultimately about numbers. If an interest group is able to really mobilize its members and base, if it is able to put together an effective electoral coalition, then any reasonable politician will pay attention, regardless of what the nature of that interest group is. Of course, once the influence is exerted and the state pays heed, it will pass legislation in the favor of the winning group. In this sense, it won’t be neutral ex post. The point is, in being open to listening to all groups and willing to be pressured or influenced, the state is neutral in principle; it doesn’t have its own biases for or against any particular part of the population. It doesn’t favor any of them. In this sense, pluralists describe the state as being neutral.

A BIASED STATE This description of politics is a very comforting one — but it seems that the American public never got the memo. If experience counts for anything, ordinary citizens have come away with the conviction that the game is rigged. Rather than seeing the state as broadly responsive to ordinary people, they view it as a remote entity that can’t be trusted. Public confidence in government is at an all-time low, with only 20 percent reporting in 2017 that it could be trusted to shepherd their interests.1 And this isn’t a blip — the measure has 1 Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government Remains at Historic Lows as Partisan Attitudes Shift,” May 2017. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

8

managed to climb over 50 percent just once since 1972, and that was right after the 9–11 attacks. For close to two generations, the majority of the American public has felt that its government can’t be trusted. And the reason isn’t hard to find. In the most recent poll, 82  percent of Americans say that the government is basically controlled by the wealthy, while 76 percent say that poor people have little influence.2 This is just the most recent telling of the same story. For almost 50 years, most Americans have felt that the reason they can’t trust government is because it is in the grip of “big” special interests — that is, rich people and corporations — while ordinary voters have little or no influence. None of these facts bode well for the pluralist understanding of a capitalist democracy. Of course perceptions can be wrong. Maybe people are just frustrated and spinning stories to comfort themselves: conspiracy theories about state capture, morality tales about the “little guy” getting shafted, etc. But it turns out that these perceptions are backed up by scholarly research. In a series of landmark studies, American political scientists are validating what most working people have known all along — that state policy is in fact very strongly biased in favor of the wealthy. One way to measure the influence of different classes of people on the state is to ask people what kind of policy they’d like to see, and then check whether the policies actually passed match up with the expressed preferences. The results are sobering. Both political parties show a marked tendency to favor the desired policies of the rich over the poor. But more importantly, when the poor have policy preferences that conflict with those of the rich, the chances that the policies of the poor are passed go down to around zero. In other words, regardless of who is in power, the only time the poor have any influence on the policy process is when wealthy people agree with them. But when their demands go against the demands

2 AP-NORC Poll, June 2017. CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

9

of wealthy people, the poor have no impact whatsoever.3 These findings have been a kind of wake-up call for mainstream academics, who have had a stubborn attachment to a pluralist viewpoint for a long time. But for most of the public, especially working families, it is hardly news — as the polling data has shown for decades. For progressives, it is in fact common wisdom, because the class bias of the state is most visible when activists try to change policy in favor of working people. They experience the state’s class bias in its resistance to their demands, in its hostile and often punitive response. It has been this way for more than 200 years, and it continues to be so today. The challenge is to first understand what the sources of state bias are and then to devise a strategy to overcome or neutralize them. That is what this pamphlet sets out to do.

CAPITALISM UNDERMINES DEMOCRACY The underlying premise of the pluralist vision is that democracy neutralizes the power differences created by capitalism. Sadly, that’s a false premise. The essence of the problem in modern societies is that capitalism overwhelms democracy, ensuring that the state is fundamentally biased toward capitalist interests. There are three basic channels through which this happens: ▪▪ The wealthy are more likely to get into office. ▪▪ The wealthy exercise greater influence on the people in office. ▪▪ Most importantly, the state’s dependence on capital ensures that politicians will favor capitalists even if the first two mechanisms fail. 3 The key work here is Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014). A good non-technical introduction is Benjamim Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do to Fix It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

10

These three almost always work together. In some countries, for some periods, labor movements have found a way to neutralize the first or the second channel. Neutralizing the third is not possible as long as we are in capitalism; it’s the fail-safe and also the deepest constraint of the three. This is why it’s the most important. But before we come to it, let’s examine the first two.

The Personnel The promise of democracy is that anyone can run for office, and as long as they can mobilize the voters behind them, anyone can win. But the reality is that the people who win tend to come from one particular interest group — the wealthy. This holds true for all levels of government. An examination of presidential administrations shows that two-thirds of the members of every cabinet in the twentieth century were corporate managers, investment bankers, or corporate lawyers.4 This means that every cabinet in recent American history was basically run by capitalists or their chief supporters. If we turn to Congress, it isn’t much better. The vast majority of House and Senate members in the US are themselves from the wealthiest sections of society. In 2014, the majority of those elected to the House were millionaires, with the median net worth being just under $1 million and that of Senate members, $2.7 million.5 Even if state managers aren’t from the capitalist class themselves, they are typically from social and institutional milieus that orbit this class, such as highlevel law firms, elite schools, and prestigious research institutes. These are people who spend their lives serving capital, even if they do not themselves own much of it. Why does this matter? Most obviously, it is because the social 4 Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality, 9th edn (Sage Press, 2015), 183. 5 Ibid., 184. CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

11

TABLE 1 VIEWS ON POLICY ISSUES (PERCENT IN FAVOR)

Jobs and Incomes Government should see to food, clothing, and shelter Minimum wage should be above the poverty line Government should provide jobs for everyone able and willing to work who cannot find a job in private employment Decent standard of living should be provided for the unemployed Health Care National health insurance should be financed by tax money Retirement Pensions Social security should be expanded Education Whatever is necessary should be spent for really good public schools Government should make sure everyone can go to college Taxes Government should reduce differences between high and low incomes Government should reduce inequality by heavy taxes on the rich   Source: EPI analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Updated from Figure A in Raising America’s Pay: Why It’s Our Central Economic Challenge, Economic Policy Institute.

CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

12

ALL CITIZENS

MULTIMILLIONAIRES

DIFFERENCE

68

43

-25

78

40

-38

53

8

-45

50

23

-27

61

32

-29

55

3

-52

87

35

-52

78

28

-50

46

17

-29

52

17

-35

 

 

 

CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

13

background of people has a huge effect on how they see things. Table 1 summarizes the differing views of the very rich and ordinary people on a number of policy issues. Notice that the views of the wealthy are consistently more conservative on all the issues. Now, if their ideas of right and wrong on these matters are skewed in this fashion and if elected officials are selected from within this group, those officials’ policy agenda will also tilt in this direction. It will result in a policy bias toward the wealthy. There’s also a less obvious way in which class location matters. Politicians’ choices aren’t just shaped by where they came from but also by where they try to get to. A substantial proportion of legislators use their time in office to enter the corporate community once they leave politics. They work as consultants, lobbyists, or intermediaries, or start businesses of their own. The contacts and insider knowledge that they accumulate while in office are invaluable for businesses trying to get access to policy makers. So a short stint in Congress or Parliament has the potential of paying huge dividends down the line. This pipeline connecting careers in government to jobs as lobbyists is so pervasive that they even have a name for it — the “revolving door.” And why does it matter? If a legislator plans to slide into the corporate community after her political career, she will strive to spend her time in office making connections with potential future employers or contacts, and showing them that she is reliable — that she can be counted on to do the right thing. This only reinforces the bias in her policy preferences toward capitalist interests.

The Influence Game Pluralists will acknowledge that the government is stacked with wealthy people. How could they deny it? But they would argue that the instruments of modern democracy serve to counteract individual bias. Whatever a politician’s own proclivities, if she ignores inputs CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

14

from her constituents, if she rides roughshod over their desires, she will lose credibility and, in the end, lose power. This is why the crux of the matter, for pluralists, isn’t the facts about legislators’ personal backgrounds but the weight of public opinion, which is expressed either in blocs of voters in elections or pressure from organized interest groups in the policy process. As long as interested parties are able to come together and exert influence on the state, the managers of the state have to pay heed to them, on pain of being booted out of office. For now, let’s assume that politicians really do have good reason to listen to public opinion and pressure groups. It should be clear that this still isn’t enough to vindicate the pluralists’ optimism. Politicians’ willingness to be receptive will only generate democratic outcomes if the poor are in fact able to get access to policy makers. For the poor to have as much chance of having their interests represented as the rich, they will also have to have as much success in forming and using pressure groups as do the rich. But if the whole influence process is dominated by the wealthy, if they are the ones who have the state managers’ ear, then, instead of the lobbying process serving to counteract the personal biases of politicians, it will in fact reinforce those biases. The lobbying success will be layered on top of the state managers’ existing personal biases, making the state more securely tilted in favor of capital. As it happens, there is very good data on who wins the influence game, and the results are weighted overwhelmingly toward capital. Take first the issue of lobbying, which is the most common means by which organized interests exert pressure on the state. In the United States, a great deal of influence peddling is carried out through registered associations stationed in Washington DC, which represent the interest groups that pluralists write about. These associations do the work of contacting legislators, writing policy briefs, making phone calls, meeting with policy makers and trying to bring them around to their constituency’s point of CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

15

view, etc. In common parlance they are called lobbyists. These are political organizations that are supposed to have access to politicians to keep them honest. But in fact, the organizations representing business interests outweigh those working for labor — many times over. In 2011, there were around 11,000 registered lobbying organizations in Washington DC. A major study of the lobbying process found that of these lobbying organizations, around 53 percent were exclusively devoted to representing business interests and less than 1 percent represented labor unions. Business lobbying groups outnumber labor groups by more than 50:1. If we look at organizations representing recipients of means-tested social welfare programs — like Medicaid or food stamps — there wasn’t a single registered organization in Washington DC devoted exclusively to their interests. If we look at expenditure, it is even more lopsided. In 2017 the total amount of money officially spent by registered lobbying organizations in Washington DC was $3.36 billion. Of this, business accounted for around $2.6 billion, while labor spent $46 million — so the ratio of business to labor spending was 56:1.6 Lobbying is just one form of exerting influence and by no means the most important. Equally significant is the role of money in elections. Running an electoral campaign, regardless of where and when, takes a great deal of money. In the United States, it takes a huge amount. In the 2016 electoral cycle, a total of almost $6.5 billion was spent in the presidential and congressional elections: a bit more than $4 billion in the latter and just under $2.4 billion in the presidential race.7 Presidential campaigns now require war chests approaching a billion dollars. In 2016, winners of a House race spent an average 6 Total lobbying from “Lobbying Database,” https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/; business total tabulated from “Alphabetical Listing of Industries,” https://www. opensecrets.org/lobby/list_indus.php (all sectors except “ideological’, “labor,” and “other”); labor total from ibid. 7 “Cost of Election,” https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/cost.php. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

16

of $1.5 million on their race, while the price tag on winning a Senate seat was $12 million.8 All this money has to come from somewhere. Politicians like to boast about how many of their contributions come in small sums, suggesting that they are being fueled by the support of working- or middle-class families. But this is a trick. The number of donors is of course skewed toward smaller ones, since most people are not rich enough to donate large sums. But if we turn from the total number of donors to the relative weight of their contributions, we get a different picture. The fact is that a very small number among them account for the vast bulk of the funds flowing into elections. In the 2016 election cycle, half of one percent (0.52 percent) of the US population accounted for more than two-thirds (67.8 percent) of all the contributions made to political campaigns.9 One of the most astonishing discoveries came from a team of researchers from the New York Times. They found that just 158 families accounted for half of all the money that had been raised by the two parties in the early stages of the 2016 election cycle — around $176 million between them.10 So even though small donors were the largest in number, they didn’t matter that much in their economic weight. It was large donors who really pushed the needle. The flow of money into elections was, and continues to be, controlled by the capitalist class — the people who are economically in the top one percent of the population. The fact that money matters so much means that those with the 8 “Election Trends,” https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/election-trends.php?cycle=2016. 9 “Donor Demographics,” https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/donordemographics.php. 10 Nicholas Cofessore, Sarah Cohen, and Karen Yourish, “The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election,” New York Times, October 10, 2015, https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/2016-presidential-election-super-pac-donors.html. CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

17

Two-thirds of the members of every cabinet in the twentieth century were corporate managers, investment bankers, or corporate lawyers.

most money wield the most clout. Aspiring candidates for office know that they have to raise a huge amount of money. Any rational candidate will also understand that it makes a lot more sense to approach those with more money to give, so as to save time and effort. Better to get a thousand dollars in one shot, as against getting ten dollars apiece from one hundred different donors. This creates a very specific challenge for candidates. They have to be the kind of candidate capitalists would want to help out. If they aren’t, then the money will flow to someone else, someone who capitalists think will better promote their interests. Candidates therefore create a personal profile and a political platform that, at the very least, won’t alienate powerful funders, so they have a fighting chance of raising the money needed to be viable. They have to make their priorities acceptable to the super-rich; they have to promise to be available to the same people in case they demand an audience; and they have to craft a policy agenda that stays within the limits of what those moneyed people deem appropriate. They don’t have to literally exchange special favors for money; the process doesn’t have to be that corrupt. They just have to promise that they will be the kind of candidate rich donors can trust. What this means is that in a money-driven electoral system, there are in fact two competitions in any electoral cycle — one behind the CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

18

scenes and the other out in the open. Behind the scenes, candidates first compete over donors; and then, later, there is the election we all see out in the open — the competition for votes. The crucial point is that the battle to attract donors decides which candidates are available in the second round, the battle for votes. Candidates who can’t find donors are either weeded out before voters can even have a chance to weigh in, or become so marginal that they don’t stand much of a chance of winning. They don’t have the money to hire staff, they can’t buy air time for advertisements, they can’t run an effective campaign, etc. They either drop out or are pushed out. So the competition for money decides who gets to run in the competition for votes. This entirely changes the role of public opinion in elections. Remember that two routes by which the public is assumed to discipline state managers is by organized lobbying and by the ballot box. In the mainstream view, a rational politician will align her policies with what the public wants, because public opinion will determine who wins in elections. According to that view, politicians’ priorities will have to line up with the priorities of the general public. But this overlooks the impact of the competition for donors. The scramble for campaign finance forces candidates to place moneyed opinion above the priorities of the general public. They are compelled to align their policy agenda to the donors’ agenda, because if they don’t, they effectively count themselves out of the electoral competition. As a result, elite opinion and general public opinion play different roles in the political process. Elite opinion is what candidates follow and prioritize, while general public opinion is something that they seek to manage. In other words, elite opinion drives the candidates’ priorities, while mass opinion plays a more passive role, as a constraint which they try to negotiate. Now, managing public opinion is not the same thing as ignoring it. What it entails is a dual strategy, depending on how it aligns with capitalist interests. First, where it doesn’t clash with what capitalists want, politicians are CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

19

happy to take it seriously, even pander to it. The best example here is non-economic issues, like religious conflicts, or social issues like sexual identity. These are often allowed to move to center stage because however they are resolved, they won’t really touch the donors’ economic interests. In fact, they are very useful as political lightning rods because letting them rise to the top of the agenda allows the policies closer to class interests be decided backstage, in negotiations between capital and state managers. Second, in cases where public opinion does in fact clash with donor interests, it has to be neutralized in some way. The most typical is by either deflecting public demands into policies less threatening to elite interests, or by appealing to “pragmatism”. The best example of this is how the parties in the US have handled public demands for national health care. For decades, popular opinion has clamored for some kind of national, public health care plan. Being unable to ignore it, both parties have tried to neutralize it. The Clintons deflected those demands in 1992, so that what the public got wasn’t a European style national health care, but a monstrous, topheavy system called “managed care,” which, under the banner of “national policy,” handed over health care to the insurance industry and private hospitals. Twenty-four years later, when Bernie Sanders raised the call for a Canadian-style single-payer system, it was once again one of the Clintons who came to the status quo’s rescue. Unable to do a baitand-switch like she had in 1992 with Bill, Hillary resorted to deflating public expectations. Hillary was the “lower your expectations” candidate. Instead of taking public opinion as her cue, her strategy was to deflate it by charging that it was not realistic. The lesson here is that, as a favorite of the corporate community, Clinton’s mandate came not from her voting public but from her donors. And her response to a demand that went against the donor interests was to do her best to neutralize the power of public opinion. In sum, when we bring both of these dimensions of the influence CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

20

game together — the lobbying game and the electoral process — what emerges clearly is an overwhelming tilt in favor of capital. The implication is that the mainstream, pluralist view of a capitalist democracy is fatally flawed, even on its own assumptions. Pluralism holds that the state and its managers are not biased toward any particular section of society, and even if they are, they have to bend to public opinion, because they will be punished if they ignore it. What we have seen is that even if state managers take their cues from whoever wins in the influence game, they will still end up catering to the wealthy. In other words, even if they are neutral in their outlook, even if they aren’t personally biased or are willing to ignore their biases, the state will still favor capitalists over the poor, because capitalists’ greater wealth gives them an enormous advantage over every other pressure group. Far from neutralizing politicians’ class biases, the political process ends up reinforcing them.

The Structural Connection The two sources of state bias we have examined so far have this in common — they stem from capitalists’ greater personal reach into the state. They are forms of state capture. The state ends up being biased because capitalists and their servants literally occupy the halls of power, or have influence over those who do. Now these mechanisms are no doubt important. Reversing them, or neutralizing them, would open up considerable space for more progressive policy, and experience teaches us that in those instances where they have been overturned, policy has tended to shift toward the interests of the poor. Most obviously, where working people have been able to form their own parties and elect candidates from more modest backgrounds, there has been a shift in the overall orientation of the state. The best example of this is labor or social democratic parties in Europe and also in parts of the Global South. In these cases, it isn’t just that policy makers have come from poorer backgrounds, but the CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

21

fact that the organizations have been able to free themselves from relying on the patronage of wealthy people. They’ve been able to raise their own funds, and just as importantly, as mass parties, they have mobilized the one resource they have in plenty — the commitment and energy of their members. They also have generated their own experts, so they are less dependent on policy advice from lobbyists; and they have direct experience in the lives of working people, so they have well-developed policy agendas. All of these qualities combine to significantly overturn the systematic advantage that capitalists otherwise have in the policy process. But while blocking the various kinds of state capture goes some distance in correcting its bias toward capital, it does not by itself overturn that bias. That is because the state’s class character isn’t fundamentally based on the fact that capitalists have more and better access to policy makers. Powerful as these are, these are in fact secondary mechanisms. This is evident in the fact that even in countries where state capture has been partially neutralized — like the social democratic countries on the European continent — the prioritization of capitalist interests has not been shaken. Policy makers still have to respect the basic integrity of private property and the social priority of the profit motive. This is because there is a deeper, more powerful force that keeps the state tethered to the interests of the capitalist class, even when the other sources of influence are weakened. And the reason it is effective is that it is the one constraint that can’t be neutralized or overturned as long as we remain in a capitalist system. The fundamental source of bias is that the state is structurally dependent on private investment for its very reproduction. Whatever else it does, whichever policies it seeks to promote, it has to first ensure that the profit-making opportunities of capitalists are secure. And a central element of securing those opportunities is the responsibility of creating a political environment that owners of capital find friendly to their needs and designs. This obliges state representatives CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

22

Elite opinion is what candidates follow and prioritize, while general public opinion is something that they seek to manage.

to respect capitalist interests, regardless of what their own programmatic goals are, whatever their political ideology happens to be. Let’s examine this more carefully. In a capitalist economy, the production of goods and services is in the hands of those who own the means of production, the capitalist class. This is true by definition. Another way of putting this is that, in capitalism, the means of production are not controlled by the state — they are privately owned. Hence, there is a clear division between political institutions and economic ones. Economic transactions are carried out under the direction of capitalists, while public affairs like law-making and enforcing the peace are the responsibility of the state. Capitalists rely on public institutions to provide the background conditions that make their profit-seeking activities possible. The state, for its part, relies on the investment by capitalists to generate new income and wealth. The fact that the state doesn’t itself own the means of production is of critical importance. Like any institution that endures over time, it needs a steady stream of revenue to fund its operations. It has to pay for the civil servants that it employs, purchase the supplies it uses in its daily activities, etc. All of this is paid out of the state budget. But the budget doesn’t magically create its own funds. They have to come from somewhere, and since the state doesn’t own its own productive assets, they have to be acquired from other sources. The CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

23

main such source is taxation. State revenues come primarily from its taxing of the general public. These taxes are either levied directly on personal or corporate income or as various indirect charges like sales tax, excise tax, and value added tax. Whatever the form, these taxes comprise the main source of revenue for the modern state. They are what keep the state running. Taxes are a claim that government makes on income. So if state managers wish to keep a steady stream of revenue coming in, the incomes on which they are making a claim also need to grow steadily. But we know, of course, that incomes in a capitalist economy depend on the investment decisions of capitalists. If capitalist employers open new establishments or simply expand their current operations, it means new jobs and more money for workers. As those new investments generate the sale of new goods and services, capitalists’ profits expand and their personal income also grows. So the growth of income for capital and labor depends on a prior expansion of investment. And that means, in turn, that buoyant tax revenues for the state depend on an expanding economy, which in turn rests on expanding investment by capitalists. This brings us to the crucial point. If capitalists could be programmed to keep up their investment activity no matter what policy makers did, then the state could pass whatever policies it wanted

Power to make social change within capitalism takes more than getting the right party or the right people into office. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

24

without much worry. The revenues would keep coming in and politicians’ favored programs would be fully funded. The problem, of course, is that capitalists are under no such compulsion to invest. If they choose, they can slow down the pace of expansion; they might decide not to invest at all; they can even shift their money overseas and park it in financial instruments. What they do with their profits is entirely up to them. For state managers, this creates a massive problem. If investors do choose to slow down the pace of investment, then it means that suddenly the budget begins to dry up, policy initiatives become uncertain, and social programs lose their funding. But just as importantly, as economic growth slows down, job growth also becomes anemic. Unemployment starts to creep up, poverty levels deepen, and the quality of life begins to deteriorate. In a democratic set-up, all of this means that the political party or president overseeing the decline in economic fortunes has to pay the price. Typically, they are pushed out of office in the next elections, since they are the ones the public holds responsible for its declining condition. So any slowdown in economic activity punishes policy makers in two ways — it deprives them of the resources they need to carry out their political agenda, and it undermines their electoral popularity. The upshot of this is that state managers are typically very careful to avoid doing anything that might antagonize capitalists. This reluctance is an index of the fact that, in a capitalist system, the state is structurally dependent on capital as part of its very essence. Regardless of what the local or political specificities happen to be, this dependence is built into the fundamental architecture of a state in a capitalist society. It obtains regardless of how well capitalists are organized as a pressure group or how densely they populate the halls of power themselves. This is why, even if the other two channels of capitalist influence fail, the state remains a class organ — an institution that has to respect and prioritize the interests of capital. Indeed, the importance of the structural dependence is that CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

25

it amplifies and strengthens the power of the other two channels of influence. Policy makers understand that their success in office fundamentally depends on the health of the economy: if people are losing jobs, they will typically vote the ruling party out of office. That being the case, political elites try their best to build investor confidence by being sensitive to investor priorities. This is why, in most cabinets, the key economic posts are given to well-known and trusted representatives from the business community. The finance ministry or treasury is typically headed by a banker; commerce is led by a leading businessperson, and so on. In matters of economic legislation, state managers don’t wait for lobbyists to approach them with advice. Very often they reach out to industry representatives and actively seek their input, to ensure that the new laws are acceptable to industry. In other words, because state managers are aware that their own security depends on investor confidence, they typically seek to build that confidence by inviting capitalists into the halls of power, granting them the access that other groups have to scratch and claw to get. Its structural dependence on capital induces the state to create interpersonal networks with individuals from that class. So even if political institutions are set up to neutralize all the advantages capitalists have in the influence game, the state has good reason to seek out that influence because of capitalists’ privileged position in the system as a whole.

REAL POWER IS IN THE ECONOMY There is a very important implication of the preceding argument. It suggests that in capitalism, real power doesn’t reside in the state, it resides in the economy. This means, in turn, that to achieve governmental office is not the same as having real power. One might say that there is a big difference between holding office and having power. Time and time again, we have seen left-wing parties make CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

26

grand promises, get elected into office, and within a short time they betray their voters. Having promised ambitious programs of social reform, they end up delivering little of it — or worse, they impose even harsher measures of economic austerity than conservative parties might do. This happens because governments, even the most radical ones, can be brought to their knees by capital without ever firing a gun. All that capital has to do is to slow down the tempo of economic activity, slow down the pace of investment, and political leaders have little choice but to change their priorities so that placating investors pushes every other priority off the table. Real power to make social change within capitalism takes more than getting the right party or the right people into office. It requires finding a way to counter the economic power of capitalists. The only way to do so is by building an alternative source of power, not just in the state, but in the economy itself, by the agent best positioned to achieve it. How this happens is the focus of the next section.

WHERE DO REFORMS COME FROM? What the preceding analysis shows is that the popular perception about government isn’t mistaken — the state is captured by the wealthy, and it does fundamentally cater to their interests. What’s more, it doesn’t favor them due to aberrations like corruption or politicians’ moral weakness. The tilt toward capital is built into the system: first, because of the immensely greater resources that capitalists can mobilize to influence politicians, but more importantly, because of the state’s structural dependence on capital. This means that, if left to its own, the state cannot be relied upon as a counterbalance to the power of the capitalist class. It won’t step in to bolster labor’s ability to negotiate a better bargain for itself, to protect workers from employers’ power, or to help working people acquire basic necessities. Indeed, the state’s most baseline tendency will be to protect the privileges acquired by the wealthy, not dilute them. CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

27

This raises an important question. If state managers will not typically pass progressive policies on their own, then where does progressive legislation come from? After all, every advanced capitalist nation, and many in the Global South, have a welfare state. And whatever else they might do, welfare states blunt the impact of market forces, sometimes redistributing income toward the working class, and at other times providing basic services at no immediate cost to them. These are clearly policies working people have themselves demanded and, more importantly, which capitalists have opposed. How could they have been promulgated if the state always and everywhere takes its cues from capital? What made this possible? We should begin by noting that the preceding analysis doesn’t imply that the state will never pass progressive reforms, but that it won’t do so if left to its own. What we have described so far is a number of mechanisms that incline the state to prioritize the interests of capital over labor. This is the normal state of affairs, the status quo, in capitalism. The mechanisms we have described exert a gravitational pull on the state, making it orbit the interests of the capitalist class. But just as with gravity, it is possible to construct mechanisms that can, within limits, loosen the grip that capital exerts on state policy. It requires the creation of countervailing forces that endow the state with a degree of independence from capital, so that it might pass policies friendlier to working people. The most important of these forces is pressure from an organized working class. Historically, it is when workers have threatened real economic disruption that states have moved in a more progressive direction.

How Class Struggle Counteracts State Bias Recall that the deepest, most powerful constraint on the state is the fact that it is structurally dependent on capital. This basic fact ensures that the state’s priorities are forced to align with the CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

28

priorities of capital. Now, it follows that if capital’s priorities were to change so that they were willing to accommodate labor’s interests, then this would open up a space for progressive reforms. This is why the labor movement matters. For, if capitalists have political power because they control the flow of investment, it is labor that creates the investable profits in the first place. A mobilized labor movement can force a choice on employers — agree to allow more progressive social policy, or face the prospect of ongoing disruption of production and hence of profit-making. In situations where workers can impose real costs on employers through strikes, slowdowns, or other forms of disruption, it dramatically weakens the normal constraints on the state. Change can now come from two different directions. First of all, policy makers who are sympathetic to labor can use the economic disruption to call on their capitalist patrons. They can make the case that employers, who have hitherto been blocking progressive reforms, need to change their position, because it is in their interest to do so. Politicians normally too timid to fight for labor now can appeal to employers’ own interests to suggest that the only way for employers to get profits flowing again is to accommodate labor’s demands. Conversely, the momentum can also come from capitalists themselves. In situations of intense strike activity and disruption by labor, there have been times when segments of the capitalist class have realized that the only way to restore stability is to concede some of labor’s demands. In these instances, labor creates a split within the class, bringing segments of the class over to the progressive coalition and becoming part of the movement pressing for reform. Thus, reforms are made possible because employers are forced to concede them. And they are forced to do so because economic disruption makes it too costly for them to continue blocking the reforms. And the disruption, finally, is possible only if the social agent that creates the flow of revenue for employers decides that it is no longer willing to do so. This is why radicals have always insisted CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

29

on the centrality of class struggle for progressive reforms. No social agent has the ability to as effectively counter the structural power of capital, because capital doesn’t depend on any other social actor in such a dramatic fashion. But does this mean that every time we want anything positive from the state, it requires a national labor mobilization? One would hope not, because that isn’t going to happen! People aren’t going to join in strike waves or pour into the streets on a weekly or monthly basis, year after year, in order to pressure the state. So how do workers maintain some pressure on the state, if they are not going to be poised to unleash economic disruption at the first sign of elite resistance? The most effective way is to establish a presence within the political system and within the state through a political party that fights for their interests — a labor party of some kind. The presence of such a political party, which is embedded in the working class and which runs for elections, creates a permanent advocate for labor’s interests. Its presence ensures that labor doesn’t have to flex its economic muscle every time a policy debate comes up. Instead, its power is institutionalized within the state and made part of the normal negotiating process between state managers. One might even say that having a dedicated party in the legislature creates a multiplier effect for whatever power labor is able to develop in the workplace. Parties are able to squeeze every bit of leverage they can out of every instance of mobilization or strike action. There is a force within the state that is committed to pushing as far as it can toward labor’s interests. There is an important caveat here. The existence of a labor party relieves the working class from having to hit the streets every time a policy debate comes up. The party fights for them instead. But, while the party might not require actual economic disruption every time it negotiates around policy, it does require that there be an effective threat of such disruption. A party in power, or in the legislature, can CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

30

only negotiate effectively for working people if there is an organized movement behind it, which could, if needed, shut down production. This is the counterpart to the threat that capital is able to wield, through its power to withhold investment if the state moves in a direction harmful to its interests. Labor party representatives have to be able to warn of a similar power from their side. So having a party can never be a substitute for building an organized and militant working class movement. Its political power in fact depends on having this movement behind it.

The Limits to Reforms How far can class organizing and class pressure go in democratizing the state? Can it fully neutralize the power of capital? While we have seen tremendous progress in the countries with the most organized working classes, there are real limits to democracy in a capitalist system. Remember that as long as investment remains in private hands, the state simply has to prioritize their interests. And private control over investment is the very definition of capitalism. Even the most radical socialist parties, even the most powerful union movements, have to bend to this. As long as governing parties choose to respect the rights and prerogatives of those who own the means of production — capitalists, bankers, agribusinesses, financiers — they have to also respect their private and social power. And even when labor manages to chip away at this power by deepening political and economic democracy, the fact remains that they can’t equalize the influence of ordinary people and the wealthy — because respecting private property means respecting the greater say that the wealthy have over economic decisions. This is what it means, after all, when we say that in capitalism real power doesn’t reside in the state but in the economy. We can democratize the state and through it substantially weaken the arbitrary power that capitalists have over the economic decisions that CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

31

affect everyone’s lives — investment, employment, wages, work time, and so forth. And we can also loosen their grip over politics. But as long as we are in a capitalist system, the state will have to respect the structural power of capital. And as long as it does that, there will be a limit to democratization. For real democracy to be possible, we would have to open up those decisions to a much greater degree of social debate and decision-making. But the level of social control over the economy needed to achieve real democracy is simply not possible in capitalism. The implication is clear-cut — while a mobilized and organized labor movement can substantially democratize social life and demand concessions from the state, capitalism imposes real limits on how far political power can be equalized between the rich and the poor. To truly enable full participation in the decisions that affect us all, it will be necessary to go beyond capitalism.

The Roots of Decline What the preceding section established is that Left political parties need to have an organized and mobilized working class movement to provide them with political leverage in the state. What we need to examine now is what happens if this partnership between the two is absent. This issue is important because it explains why parties that proclaim a socialist commitment have, in recent years, not only abandoned their radical programs, but have gone to the other extreme — of imposing harsh austerity measures on their own supporters. It shouldn’t be a surprise that if Socialist or Left parties come to power without organized class power, or find that power waning, they have to scale back their goals to what the balance of power allows them to achieve. This is because when they try to pass their policies in Parliament or Congress, their political opponents don’t have much reason to agree to it. In these situations, conservative parties know that the Left doesn’t have the “boots on the ground” to give them political leverage, and this weakens the Left parties’ hand CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

32

in political negotiations. More conservative elements within the party itself can now make a case for scaling back radical ambitions in the name of “realism” — and they will be right, because policy agendas that were realistic when backed up with real working class power will now in fact be out of reach. Left parties in this situation find that the pressure coming from business is now far more menacing because business itself has less to fear from a backlash by organized labor. Gradually, these parties have to adjust their agendas to bring them closer in line with business preferences — because that’s what the balance of power demands. There are two distinct routes to this rightwards drift of labor parties. One is when, due to economic shifts or political attacks, their working class base is eroded. An example would be if, due to deindustrialization, parties whose class support came from workers in the manufacturing sector found that their most ardent and militant union members became unemployed or shifted into sectors that were unorganized. In this case, a labor party might be very ambitious, but would find that it has lost a lot of the muscle that would have enabled it to fight for reforms. But the loss of a working class base can also come from old-fashioned class struggle, as in the United States during the 1980s, when union membership dropped through the floor in a matter of a few years under political attacks from employers. The political results were predictable. The conservative wing of the Democratic Party, under the leadership of Bill Clinton and others, pulled its agenda in a clearly corporate direction and was able to silence its more progressive critics, mainly under the banner of political realism. The second route has been that of many European social democracies, in which economic transformation also played a role. But in this case, its effect was amplified by a growing conservatism within the political leadership, both in the parties and in the unions. The establishment of welfare states in these countries had been carried out under pressure from very militant and highly mobilized labor CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

33

movements in the 1930s and 40s. But already in the early years after World War II, unions in Europe were coming under the sway of more conservative leaders, who were concerned with maintaining industrial peace after years of bloody warfare and economic hardship. This conservatism from unions was reinforced by their party allies within the state, who not only listened to union leaders, but also were under pressure from capitalists to restore the basis for economic growth. The result was that the biggest union federations and largest political parties of the Left adopted a program of guarded cooperation with employers through the 1950s and 60s. While this was rejected by the European working class for a brief spell at the end of the 1960s, the conservative agenda came back to the fore by the time of Reagan and Thatcher. By the 1980s, labor parties had largely lost or forgotten the tradition of militant unionism. Meanwhile, the ability of unions to even fight back was rapidly eroding, as the unionized sections of the working class were shrinking rapidly. Not surprisingly, these parties shifted rapidly to the Right, so that, by the 2000s, even though they still had a working class base, their political agendas had moved very close to the mainstream center parties. We can see, then, that there are four possible scenarios in capitalism with regard to the state. The box numbered 1 in Table 2 describes a situation when there is no labor movement and no labor party. This is the worst combination for progressive reform, because neither of the two enabling conditions for pressuring the state exists. We should expect countries that fit into this box to have the most conservative policy agendas, and governments least receptive to the demands of the poor. In the advanced industrial world, this describes the United States. The box numbered 2 describes a situation when there is a labor movement pressuring the state from the outside, but with no help from a party inside the state. The historical case embodying this would again be the United States, but in the late 1930s, when a CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

34

TABLE 2. POSSIBLE SCENARIOS IN CAPITALISM

Labor Movement

NO

YES

1

2

US: Today

US: 1930s

YES

3

4

Europe: 1990s

Europe: 1930s

Labor Party

NO

massive and organized labor movement exploded on the scene and pushed the Democratic Party to pass social welfare reforms. Notice that while this labor explosion pushed the state in a more progressive direction, the impulse was also weaker than it would have been had a labor party been in place to take advantage of the class balance in society. Whereas a labor party would have worked to extract maximum leverage from the power of the organized working class, the Democratic Party was dragged in a more radical direction against its will and did only what it absolutely had to. Indeed, the Southern wing of the party in Congress worked actively to undermine the demands coming from labor and was quite successful in this effort. And by 1947, when the most radical edge of the labor movement was subdued, Congress was able to launch the first and most significant policy package aimed at rolling back the New Deal, in the form of CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

35

if state power is to be harnessed to progressive ends, it will require a countervailing force to the power of capital. The most important such force is the working class, because of its location in the very heart of the system. the Taft–Hartley Act, which took away from labor many of the legal protections that the earlier Wagner Act had been able to provide. This rapid decline in influence was a direct result of the fact that the Democrats were never transformed into a labor party. They remained a party of business, which gave some space to labor but always in a subordinate position. As soon as the immediate threat of disruption subsided after 1938, business-backed policy makers began to chip away at the gains acquired during the 1930s. The disadvantages of the situation embodied in the box numbered 2 are clearer when we compare it with the box numbered 4, when there is both a labor movement and a labor party. This describes the political balance in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, when a model of social democracy was created that was far more ambitious than Roosevelt’s New Deal. Starting with the years right after the Great Depression and stretching into the period after World War II, European labor movements grew in strength, but also had their own parties winning elections and taking office. Unlike the Democrats in America, who did as little as they could get away with, the European Left parties — Labour, Socialists, and Communists — maximized the leverage that the working class movement was able to generate. The result was that Western Europe was able build welfare states that were deeper, more generous, and more enduring than the American one. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

36

The situation in the box numbered 3 captures the political scene in Europe after the 1980s. By this time, the organized labor movement was in retreat across much of the Continent, union density was declining, and established unions were moving to a very narrow and defensive stance. Their disruptive potential was severely weakened, which meant that the Left parties attached to them had very little pressure from the working class. All the pressure now came from capital. And not surprisingly, this is when the slow dismantling of the European welfare state began. It began slowly, because even though the unions were getting weaker, they still were a force. And even though the Left parties were becoming more conservative, they still had a strong social democratic tradition. But by the early 2000s, the shift was very clear and moved at an increasing speed. By this time, it wasn’t a case of Left parties finding themselves without the power base to defend the welfare state; their internal culture had moved substantially toward the ethos of the mainstream parties. The challenge for the Left today is to engineer a shift toward the scenario represented in the box numbered 4. In the United States, this seems a very tall order. European labor movements at least have some semblance of Left parties which they can contemplate reforming — as in the case of Labour in Britain. Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters can envision not only taking hold of the party but also revitalizing the connection with the unions and energizing the militant sections of the working class. And conversely, radical labor organizers can at least think about how to work with a reformed Labour party to push through a progressive policy agenda. But in the United States, in the short term, the most likely scenario is to move from box 1 to box 2. It is not impossible that they might leap into box 4 and might generate the first real mass socialist or labor party, as a component or an offshoot of a revitalized labor movement. That would of course be the most desirable scenario. But the conditions for that to happen are more remote.

CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

37

CONCLUSION The state in capitalism is not and cannot be politically neutral. It can’t embody the famous image of Lady Justice, who weighs the demands from various quarters on a finely tuned moral scale, free of all bias. Rather, its very structure ensures that the state will always be strongly biased toward the holders of wealth and capital. This bias, built into the very structure of the state, carries a very important political implication. Unless some countervailing force is present, government in a capitalist country will tend to reinforce the existing inequalities, rather than try to reduce them; it will protect power and privilege, rather than try to neutralize it; and it will place obstacles in the way of social reform, instead of easing its path. This means that if state power is to be harnessed to progressive ends, it will require a countervailing force to the power of capital. The most important such force is the working class, because of its location in the very heart of the system. But, we might also ask, does this mean that, short of a mobilized labor movement, nothing can move the state in a more progressive direction? What about other forms of pressure, mass movements that are large, but in which labor might not be a central actor? This is an important question because in the recent past we’ve seen quite significant mobilizations around electoral campaigns — the Bernie Sanders phenomenon in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. These generated enormous enthusiasm and unleashed a great deal of energy, which wasn’t just confined to the narrow electoral arena. The answer is that these mobilizations do in fact have great potential in two ways. The first is that, even though they are not laborbased, they have to be reckoned with by political elites, because they can impose costs. They can shake up the complacency of policy makers, who now have to worry about electoral challenges more than they would otherwise. Legislators who typically ignore their constituencies have to consider the possibility that they might lose their CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

38

seats. And maverick politicians who don’t normally stand a chance of being elected might find their viability suddenly increased, if they can capitalize on the changing mood. So these electoral mobilizations are certainly important, because they share a similarity with activated labor movements — they impose some degree of costs on elites who refuse to listen. But of course, just how far they can push the needle is a different matter. At the end of the day, mobilizations of this kind — if they can’t reach into the labor movement — face severe limits. Their focus is on getting better people elected, which is important, but the people who they elect simply step into the same institutional constraints that trapped their predecessors. The newly elected now have to deal with the pressure and power that moneyed people have. And precisely because the mass campaigns don’t really disrupt the economy, capitalist power and leverage isn’t really touched. They continue to put pressure on legislators maybe with a little more caution, but with enough force to severely limit the scope for reform. So the ability of these mass mobilizations to push public policy is confined to those areas where capitalists won’t object very much, leaving many of the really significant issues off the table. Still, this isn’t a reason to denigrate electoral mobilizations. And this brings us to the second great potential. In an era like ours, in which the labor movement is so weak and demoralized, a radical and highly energetic electoral mobilization can have the effect of catalyzing the labor movement itself. By bringing so many people out into politics, by energizing the population around progressive issues, it can help reverse the sense of isolation and demoralization within labor. Unions can feel that they have the public standing with them, demanding the same sorts of things that progressive unions have long been fighting for, and in this changed political culture bosses might be more willing to negotiate — or at a minimum, less inclined to take a very hard line. This is especially the case in the service sector, in which employers have traditionally stoked public opinion CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

39

to make the unions appear as narrow special interests, looking out for themselves at the public expense — think of teachers, transportation workers, postal workers, and so on. But when the public itself begins to demand, say, more funding for schools or better trains, etc. the task of challenging the employer seems less daunting to unions. Hence, even though the road to progressive reforms goes through the house of labor, it doesn’t have to start there. The energies that go into organizing the working class can be acquired from other movements and other sources. The main point is that these movements need to be broad and ambitious, inclusive, and capable of challenging the basic distribution of power and resources. They need to be focused on the centers of power and audacious. This is what many of the recent explosions around the world have in common — Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the mobilization for Corbyn, to name the most well-known. None of them were based in labor. Yet all of them were significant in moving the political culture, raising morale and political ambition, and all of them have in some way enlivened parts of the labor movement. They have contributed to a sense, around the world, that perhaps the long dark night of neoliberalism might be drawing to a close. And maybe it is. But how far we are able to press this will depend, in the end, on how much power we can muster — against the state and the class of investors who stand behind it. This is the subject of the next pamphlet in the series.

CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

40

CAPITALISM AND THE STATE

41

$5.00

Vivek Chibber

The ABCs of Capitalism

Capitalism and Class Struggle

The ABCs of Capitalism Understanding Capitalism By Vivek Chibber

IN THIS SERIES A. Understanding Capitalism B. Capitalism and the State C. Capitalism and Class Struggle

To order individual or bulk copies: jacobinmag.com/store Published by Jacobin Foundation 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

Capitalism and Class Struggle Since its origin in the nineteenth century, the modern Left has been associated with two things — a moral stance and a political strategy. The moral stance is that there is something fundamentally unjust about capitalism. It’s an economic system that places the vast majority of people in permanent material insecurity; the only way for people to mitigate this insecurity is by offering themselves up to be exploited by capital. This offer also contains an agreement that while they are working for their bosses, they will give up their autonomy and do what they’re told; this, in turn, gives property owners power over the working class majority, both within the workplace, and in society at large. The state can’t be counted on as a counterbalance to the power of capital, since capitalists’ economic power also gives them enormous leverage over government. So both economic and political power is concentrated in capitalists’ hands, and they use CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

4

that power to maintain their exploitation of labor. When we put all this together, it means that capitalism systematically deprives people of the basic ingredients for a decent life, such as material security, personal autonomy, the resources for self-determination, and mutual respect — which is just another way of saying that capitalism is fundamentally unjust. How, then, might we bring about a more humane society? A very common approach is to appeal to the better instincts of those in power. This usually means encouraging charitable donations and volunteer work, and, more recently, promoting Corporate Social Responsibility programs. But the response of the Left has always been to deny the feasibility of this strategy, because pleading with capitalists to behave better overlooks the structural pressure on them to abuse their power. No matter how much they are exhorted to be nicer, the pressure of market competition makes it impossible for them to respect their employees’ well-being while also protecting the bottom line. What in fact happens is that, rather than bringing their actions in line with their morality, capitalists modify their morality to justify their actions. Hence, if workers are to have a better life — with more security, more freedom, and better work conditions — it will very likely have to be acquired over their employers’ resistance. So the first component of the Left’s recipe for a more humane society is the conviction that it will have to be brought about by political struggle, not by appeals to decency. This naturally leads to the question, what kind of political struggle? What is the political strategy that might enable the poor and the exploited to acquire the basics needed for a decent life? The conventional response has been that it should center around organizing and mobilizing labor — what is classically described as class struggle. This is why, for more than a century, the Left physically located itself in the everyday lives and the employment venues of working people. The focus on labor as the fulcrum for social change is undoubtedly the defining element of the radical Left as a political current, and it has been so for more than 150 years. CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

5

In this pamphlet we examine the reasoning behind this strategy. As we will see, it is fundamentally a strategic choice, not a moral or ideological imperative. This is not to say that moral motivations are unimportant, or that ideology isn’t relevant. They both matter a great deal. But they cannot on their own justify class politics. The reason labor struggles are central is that they are the enabling condition for everything else. They create the power and the political leverage that enables us to act on our morals and ideological beliefs — whereas the morals and values without the leverage remain little more than pipedreams. In what follows we develop the classic rationale for a class-based political strategy. We examine how it works and also why, even though it deserves to be at the heart of progressive politics, it is so hard to organize and sustain.

WHY THE WORKING CLASS? Why develop a political strategy around the labor movement? There are three basic reasons. First, and this is often lost in intellectual debate — workers happen to be the majority of society. In the United States, the working class accounts for something like two-thirds of the population.1 Any political movement that claims to fight for social justice had better represent the interests of more than just a small section of the population. It has to be fighting for things that most people want and need, not just some chosen few, no matter how badly off that particular small group is. One of the Left’s most compelling attributes has always been that it can claim to be fighting for the needs of the vast majority. Second, these masses of working people have good reason to want change. And third, they have a unique capacity for bringing about progressive change.

1 Estimates vary, of course, but most reliable studies put workers somewhere in the 60%–75% range. A good non-technical survey is Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority, 2nd edn (Cornell University Press, 2012), chapter 1, esp. 29–31. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

6

The interest in fighting for progressive politics comes from the fact that working people are systematically denied many of the basic things that go toward a decent life. The reasons for this were described in detail in Pamphlet 1, but it is worth briefly rehearsing them again.

Insecurity To be in the working class means that you lack direct access to the means of production. The only way to secure a livelihood is by finding a job working for somebody else. Both The ability to find a job and then to keep it, are only partly in the hands of the worker. They are primarily controlled by the employer, which leaves the worker’s fate in someone else’s hands. Now, in itself, this need not be problematic. A condition of dependence on somebody else isn’t harmful if the dominant party has the same interests as the weaker one and assumes responsibility for the weaker one’s welfare. The problem for workers is that their employers have no direct interest in the employee’s welfare. Their direct interest is only in one thing — maximizing profits. They hire new workers only when it is profitable to do so, and they keep them on only as long as it is good for the bottom line. This means that workers are in a situation of permanent insecurity. They don’t know if they will find a job, and if they do find one they are not sure if it will pay them enough to sustain themselves and their loved ones, if they have dependents. In the Global South today, the basic situation of billions of workers is one of long- term migrancy and temporary employment, as they travel from city to city, region to region in search of employment. They live in temporary dwellings, lack basic amenities, and can’t even begin to plan out their lives. Even in the advanced industrial world, the recent trend has been away from long-term employment, so that jobs that were once the emblem of security and decent wages are shifting to temporary contract labor and hence deepening the experience of insecurity for the labor force. CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

7

Needless to say, being in this situation undermines any chances for economic and psychological well-being. Temporary jobs are also typically lower waged; they also tend to come without health and pension benefits, which is one of the reasons employers are switching over to them. Lower wages and no benefits mean a decline in living standards for employees; they also mean compromised health and longevity. The incessant search for jobs and uncertainty about their economic condition means that working people can’t plan effectively for the future, even the near future.

Wage suppression It is not just the precariousness of employment that workers have to overcome. The job itself is fraught with conflict. Since employers have to maximize profits, they have no choice but to strive to minimize their operating costs. And this calls for a very specific strategy with regard to their employees. Most importantly, minimizing costs entails that they hold down wages to the lowest feasible level. Just what that level happens to be will depend on the bargaining position of the employees. But whatever this bargaining position happens to be, it is never one of equality. A defining fact of capitalist labor markets is that employers are always and everywhere in a position of strength relative to their employees. This comes from the simple fact that when it comes down to it, an employer can hold out longer than any employee in an economic stand-off. What can vary and change is the degree of the employer’s advantage — in some situations it can be greater, in others it may be less; but the simple fact of having an advantage is built into the relationship. Workers therefore can’t count on the fact that if they just work harder, their wages will also increase. From the employer’s standpoint, every extra dollar that her firm makes is an extra dollar of profit, which she can use as she sees fit — there is no reason for her to give a part of it back to her employees unless she absolutely has CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

8

to. And as long as she can get away with not giving part of it back, she won’t. This has become abundantly clear in the past forty years, in which the productivity of American manufacturing enterprises has increased by more than 78 percent, but wages have only gone up by slightly over 5 percent. What this means is that employers had lots of new money in their hands that could have gone into higher wages, but went instead into the firms’ coffers — and then into new investments or into the boss’s pockets. There was no “trickle down,” there was only a vacuuming up. Hence, not only is there uncertainty about finding and keeping a job, but there is also no guarantee that workers will share in the gains that come from their labor. The boss’s greater power enables her to scoop up the lion’s share of new revenue; and the competitive pressure of the market compels her to use that power to the worker’s detriment. This creates direct conflict of interest between the worker and employer.

Labor extraction Wage suppression is just one side of the labor equation. The flip side is the drive to extract the maximal labor effort from the worker. This shows up in two seemingly contradictory ways. The first is in the well-known phenomenon of speed-up. When an employee is paid by a particular unit of time — like an hour or a day — the capitalist wants to be certain that every minute of that time period is put to good use. Every minute that the employee isn’t working is, to the boss, a minute stolen. It is time for which she is paying the worker but getting nothing back in return. So at the very least, the capitalist will try to manage the workplace to minimize “slack.” But that’s just the baseline. The more desirable outcome is not just to minimize non-work, but to ratchet up the actual amount of labor effort per hour or minute. Working harder, faster, and better — that is the mantra of the rational capitalist. CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

9

A defining fact of capitalist labor markets is that employers are always and everywhere in a position of strength relative to their employees.

What does this mean for the employee? Two things. The most obvious is that no amount of effort is ever enough. Every time employees show they can work faster, that new rate becomes the standard, and that standard becomes the new minimum acceptable rate. If some employees find a way to go longer without a break, then that duration becomes the new expectation of all employees in the plant. If a few employees are willing to work longer without overtime, then that becomes the expectation going forward. The art of management is finding ways of getting more effort from workers without having to pay them for it. So, one implication is overwork. The second, which seems contradictory, is underwork. In many sectors like retail and food service, workers face the problem of not getting enough hours and, on top of that, not having a fixed schedule at work. They are told that they might be called in at any point, often with only a few hours’ notice, and typically don’t know how long they will be asked to stay. Some days they work three hours, others they might work ten. They rarely accumulate a full forty hours over the week, and often have to juggle two or three jobs. But coordinating multiple jobs becomes hard, because of the unpredictable schedules that come with them. For the employer, this strategy makes sense for the same reasons CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

10

that overwork does. Remember that her goal is to get the most work out of her employees for every dollar that she spends on them. In many service industries, the problem is that during any given day, the flow of customers isn’t easy to predict. There might be some days when it’s very thick, and others when it’s thin. During periods when business is thin, she will discover that she is “overstaffed”. What this means is that she is paying people to do nothing — it's wasted money. So from her standpoint, the ideal solution is to have complete flexibility as to when to call her workers in and when to send them home. An added benefit is that, if she has such power, she can also avoid having to pay overtime, since she can end their workweek at the 39-hour mark.

Autonomy Spread across all three issues outlined above, and in many other aspects of workers’ lives, is one constant — that the price they have to pay for getting a job is to place themselves under someone else’s control. The condition on which the worker acquires a job is that she agrees to give up her autonomy to her boss. And all her activity while at work becomes directed toward ends which she hasn’t chosen. She has little or no say in how she spends eight, ten, sometimes twelve hours at a time — which is a major component of her waking life. What’s more, the activities that she is asked to perform are not only selected by someone else, but often cause her considerable harm. She has to perform them, because the alternative of being jobless is so dire. Loss of autonomy in the workplace also generates a loss of control outside it. Having no say in how long or how hard they have to work has enormous consequences for workers when they are technically off the job, at home. In cases where they are overworked, the time at home is reduced to the point that they have very little chance to do anything but get ready to go back to work the next day. Time for CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

11

friends, family, entertainment now begins to look like a luxury. Conversely, in situations of underwork, there’s technically lots of spare time, but in fact very little scope to use it, since a call might come at any time to go to work. What should technically be free time, in both instances, just becomes an offshoot of the workplace. The job ends up taking control of most all of the worker’s life, not just the hours she is physically at work. The resentment created by this sense of powerlessness shouldn’t be underestimated. In some way or form, most every worker often feels like her life is not under her own direction. And throughout the history of the labor movement, demands for more say in the conditions of work has been a constant goal. Even while intellectuals have not always seen the link, workers have understood how their subordination at work also leads to their subordination to work. This is why they have held that acquiring more power at work is key to enriching their social and cultural life outside it.

Capacity for social change Thus, in addition to the fact that workers are numerically preponderant in capitalism, they also have a direct interest in pursuing the goods that are essential for social justice — since they are systematically denied them. But by itself, this isn’t sufficient. After all, one can easily come up with other groups of people who also lack basic amenities, or who are oppressed and marginalized — the homeless, the old and infirm, indigenous populations, etc. If having an interest in more resources and more stability were the only rationale for concentrating on the working class, then it would fall short — since all of these other groups would be equally important for political strategy. And it might legitimately be claimed that it is arbitrary to “privilege” the labor movement above other groups, whose condition is just as dire as that of workers — indeed, sometimes more so. Actually, on purely moral grounds, the Left has always maintained CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

12

that all the oppressed and marginalized are equally deserving of political attention. As Lenin famously insisted, the labor movement can’t hive itself off from other dominated groups as if it were a simple interest group. He insisted that it had to be a “tribune of the people … [fighting] oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects.”2 The same sentiment motivates Gramsci’s idea that the socialist movement had to rise above its “economic-corporate” political identity and seek to represent all subordinate groups. The socialist Left has long understood that workers have not cornered the market on oppression. So, then, why the focus on labor? The fuller justification for the centrality of labor has to do with its political leverage — its capacity to bring about change owing to its structural location. What is special about it is that it is the only social group that both confronts capital on a daily basis and is positioned to bring capital to heel. As we have seen in Pamphlets 1 and 2, capital is the primary source of power in modern society, within the economy as well as in the state. It uses this power to advance its own interests, and it is these very interests that have to be confronted by a movement seeking significant changes in income, time, and social insurance. Any social movement committed to greater economic security for the poor, better working conditions, more free time, better access to social services, and so on soon finds itself opposed by the owners of capital, because employers’ management strategy is geared towards denying these ends. This has been the lesson that all popular movements have learned over the past two centuries. And precisely because capital as a social group is hostile to such demands, the state, too, is either indifferent or resistant to them. Movements have learned that they cannot count on the state to take their side against capital, since the state is itself dependent on capital. 2 V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done, Collected Works, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), vol. 5, 423. CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

13

Any movement to change the distribution of income, time, and freedoms will fail unless it can overcome resistance from capital, and its henchmen in the state. What makes the working class special is its ability to do just this. First of all, the modern workplace already organizes workers to some extent. The nature of work in modern economies is such that it brings workers together in pretty large numbers under the same roof. They see one another every day and coordinate their actions in producing whatever good they are selling. This places them in a kind of organized and disciplined relation to one another, which is already the essence of what they want to achieve if they band together in order to negotiate with their boss. They already cooperate and work together on a daily basis. What they now have to do is to build on this infrastructure and create an organization of their own, which fights for their own needs, not the needs of their employer. But even more importantly, when workers do organize collectively, they have the unique ability to strike at the very foundation of capital’s power — profits. In the normal course of things, employers wield power over their workers because they can throw them out of a job, and thereby deprive the worker of a livelihood. Now, this potentially also has a cost for the employer, because even though the worker lost something she needed — her job — so too the employer — a unit of labor power, someone who was carrying out a necessary task. Just as the fired employee needs to now find a new job, so too the employer needs to replace her labor power with a new one, another employee. In normal times, this isn’t a problem for her. There are dozens of people eager to replace the person she fired, and this is why she can lord it over the employee — because the employee knows that it’s far easier to find a replacement for her than it is for her to find a new job. But in certain conditions, the worker can use this situation to her advantage. Because while it’s fairly easy for her boss to find one or two, or even ten replacements, it generally gets harder as the CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

14

number of lost workers increases. In other words, the cost of finding replacements goes up in direct proportion to the numbers. If they can coordinate with one another, so that they can withdraw their labor power collectively, then the employees can turn the tables on the boss — because now she can’t run her operations at all. They can stop the flow of profits. Even more, in a competitive market, the temporary stop in her operations can potentially have long term consequences, since competitor firms can now walk away with the employer's customers. So while one worker fears the prospect of withdrawing her labor power, the collective of workers can use it as a weapon. In normal business conditions, when profits are flowing in, nothing is more devastating to a capitalist than the disruption of that flow. And nothing brings her to the table, and take seriously the concerns of her employees, like the threat of such a disruption. Whereas under normal conditions she can safely ignore most demands coming from her workers, job actions by her labor force make it costly for her to ignore those very demands. With every passing day, she loses the profits that would have been flowing into her office, and she sees customers either walking away to rival firms, or switching to other products. This ability to impose devastating costs on capital gives labor a special place in the power constellation of capitalism. An unorganized working class is largely at the mercy of capital. But once organized, it is also the only force that can bring capital to heel. An organized and mobilized labor movement changes the social balance of political power. First and most obviously, workers get more control over the basic conditions of their lives. Achieving higher wages translates into better access to necessities; shorter and more regulated work schedules means more free time at home to pursue other ends; curbing managerial despotism at the workplace means a better and healthier work environment; and all these things add up to more control for workers over the details of their own lives — more autonomy. And if this happens at a large scale, across large sections CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

15

of the economy, it means, by definition, a massive improvement in the quality of life for the vast majority of the population, since this majority is comprised of workers. But just as importantly, as labor achieves more power against capital, it also loosens capital’s grip on the state. As we explained in Pamphlet B, if employers feel that they have to make real concessions to labor, if they truly fear the threat of economic disruption, then they also make concessions in the realm of state policy. A mobilized labor movement doesn’t change the basic fact of the state’s dependence on capital. But because it changes capital’s preferences — in making capitalists more willing to concede to their demands — these changed preferences create more room for a progressive policy agenda. Policies that state managers knew would not have been tolerated by their patrons before, now become palatable to those same patrons. Even right-wing governments have to acknowledge labor’s power in these situations, because these governments want to avoid economic disruption as much as their corporate funders do. So an appropriately organized working class, with real power, and with the ability to significantly disrupt the flow of profits, changes the power balance in society more profoundly than any other social group. No other group has the combination of being in the numerical majority, having an interest in progressive change, and also having the capacity to bring it about.

FROM RESISTANCE TO TRANSFORMATION The fact that workers have an interest in organizing themselves, and that they are also pretty well positioned to carry it out, led innumerable commentators over the past 150 years to predict that capitalism’s days were numbered. The most famous such pronouncement came from Karl Marx, who declared in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 that, in bringing masses of workers together this way, capitalism creates “its own gravediggers”. Marx wasn’t alone in this CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

16

prognosis. It’s fair to say that in the first third of the 20th century, there was a wide sentiment among political observers that the system was under attack and could very well be in danger. They weren’t so far from the truth. There was a workers’ revolution in Russia in 1905, and then again in 1917, massive labor uprisings in Germany and Austria in 1918, in Italian factories in 1920, then again in Germany in 1923, Shanghai in 1927-28, and then, after the Great Depression, another massive wave of strikes and organizing all over the Western World, culminating in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. This quarter-century or so witnessed a steady wave of political explosions in the working class, concentrated in Europe and North America but spreading in a giant arc around the globe. The grave-diggers seemed to be working over-time! Two things happened that tempered the optimism of these early decades — the first was that, in the most advanced countries, which were supposed to have been the sharp end of class struggle, workers were unable to tear down capitalism. In some cases, they weren’t even inclined to try. So in Germany, England, and the United States unions made gains, and even rattled the walls a bit, but capitalism survived. This seemed to go against the predictions of Marx and other socialists after him. The second development was that, by the 1970’s, it was starting to look like even the capacity or desire to be the gravediggers of capitalism was dissipating. In the United States and England, labor unions actually suffered a very quick and dramatic slide in strength, while in other advanced countries, they only managed to hold their ground and then to seek out a peaceful coexistence with employers. The decades of the 1980’s onward witnessed a reversal of fortune for labor, compared to the first thirty years of the century. The result was that supporters of the labor movement began to wonder if maybe they had been overly optimistic about how simple or inevitable it might be for workers to take advantage of their position in capitalism and organize to advance their interests. What kind of conclusions should we draw from the experience of the past century? Nobody doubts that the early socialists’ CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

17

expectations regarding the working class were much too optimistic. But it would also be foolish to join the chorus of later intellectuals who have written off the labor movement. What the decades of historical experience point to is this — Marx was right in his judgment that the best way for workers to defend their well-being was by banding together in collective organizations; but he underestimated, or at least, failed to adequately describe, the hurdles that workers have to overcome when they set out to organize themselves. And these hurdles are steep. No account of labor’s political interests can be complete unless we have a fuller understanding of them. And so, it is not enough to lay out all the reasons why workers might want to organize themselves and all the conditions that enable them to do so. We have to balance the story with an account of the conditions that pull in the opposite direction, and which undermine the possibility of collective organization. This will allow us to understand both of the relevant issues — why it makes sense for workers to organize themselves, and what the obstacles are that they have to overcome when they organize.

INDIVIDUAL VERSUS COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE It is important to recognize that workers don’t automatically turn to workplace organizing to improve their situation. In fact, the most natural strategy is to find ways to improve their condition individually. This is so because, as we will see shortly, trying to do it collectively takes lots hard work and has its own added risks. For workers who are on their own, without union protection, the instinct is to adopt individualistic strategies. This is their baseline situation, the one that they are naturally slotted into unless some special conditions enable them to bargain collectively. We should note that it is also the strategy that bosses want their employees to use, and which they work very hard to maintain as the only possible one available. How can a worker defend herself, or better her condition, CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

18

individually? One way is by using what is called an “exit option” — by threatening to quit. The threat to quit is an ultimatum, to the effect that unless her demands are met, she will take her skills elsewhere, perhaps to one of her employer’s competitors. What makes it effective is that it could impose two costs on the employer: the direct cost of replacing this particular employee, which amounts to the revenue that goes into screening new applicants and then the time it takes to train them; and the indirect costs of all the advantages she will give her competitor if she starts working for her. It’s these costs that make her employer stand up and maybe listen to her demands. Of course, the threat only works if the employee is hard to replace. And that will only be the case if she happens to be very skilled at her job or have some kind of highly technical knowledge about the product. This is what will make it costly to find a replacement. As it happens, in those cases where particular workers are in fact very highly skilled or really do have very specialized knowledge, they are usually able to command a pretty hefty premium for their services. The problem is that this is a bargaining strategy that is going to be open to only a small proportion of the labor force. Most workers don’t have scarce skills and therefore can’t really impose serious replacement costs on their employer. Even “skilled” workers can be replaced, if the knowledge that enables them to be counted as skilled is widely available — like having a college degree. The ones that are really at an advantage, that really do have scarce talents, are ones with product-specific training, not general training. Replacing one college graduate with another isn’t all that hard. But replacing someone who has been trained in a particular programming technique, or that particular software, usually is. Since the vast majority of workers aren’t hard to replace, the boss can handle a difficult employee by just firing her. For the boss, this carries a very low cost since she can pick up another worker without much trouble. But for the worker, it means something very different. Precisely because she has the same profile as so many other job CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

19

seekers, there isn’t anything that makes her particularly desirable. And that in turn makes the chances of finding a new job pretty dim, since she’ll be competing with many others for the same position. This in turn means that, instead of imposing a cost on her employer by her decision to quit, it’s the employee who will be bearing all the costs and all the risks. So it’s no wonder that for the vast majority of workers in a capitalist economy, the exit option isn’t very appealing. Instead of figuring out what the best time might be to walk into the boss’s office and threaten to quit, they work as hard as they can to hang on to the job they have. There are some situations when workers find their bargaining situation improved, even if they are with normal skills. This happens when unemployment is very low and jobs are easier to find in all sectors of the labor market. It’s what economists call “full employment”. In those situations, individual-level strategies can work to some extent, and they have. Workers find that, instead of their competing with other poor souls on the job market, it’s employers who have to worry about finding applicants to fill the positions they advertise. This changes the power balance somewhat between the two. Workers are less worried about getting fired, since they can find a new job in a matter of days. They become bolder, less intimidated, and they are able to bid up their wages. But these situations are rare

Workers choose individual strategies because the collective one carries risks and costs that make it seem out of reach. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

20

and tend to be short-lived. In fact, a noticeable rise in wages is often followed by an economic recession, which throws droves of workers out of work and brings wages back down, as a crowded labor market forces workers to accept employment at reduced wages. Hence, the typical situation is for there to be far more people looking for jobs than there are jobs. The other way to resist is by staying on the job, but undermining the boss’s demands as much as possible. This can be done in a variety of ways — one rather subtle method is by just working more slowly, or with less care, than managers demand. Maybe you work just hard enough to not get fired; you cut corners, take slightly longer breaks than allowed, show up a little late and leave a little early, etc. You don’t get a higher wage this way, of course. But you do snatch back some of your time, and preserve your health slightly. But most of all, you get the pleasure of knowing that you are resisting the demands made on you. In more extreme cases, workers will actually sabotage the labor process — break a machine, remove a cog, etc. This isn’t just an expression of frustration. It has also been a way of forcing a break in brutal work schedules. But these methods of resisting are also very limited, just as individual negotiating is. They are only effective as long as the worker isn’t caught, or as long as the manager is willing to tolerate her shirking. It’s a way of blunting the sharp edge of workplace domination, but its effects are pretty meager. Neither of the ways of resisting we have discussed here are really viable in the long run, not if workers want real gains.

THE OBSTACLES TO COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE Most workers know that there is only so much they can do as individuals. This is why they are careful not to overstep their bounds. Of course this means that, for the most part, they remain trapped in pretty awful work situations. So then, why don’t they all just come CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

21

together and create organizations for collective action? Many intellectuals have said that the reason is that workers don’t fully understand their situation or their interests — that they suffer from a “false consciousness”. But this is hard to believe. If a journalist or a professor can understand, why can’t a worker? After all, she is the one who goes to work every day, suffers the boss’s power, and sees the real limits of her own power. Why not do the obvious and get together with other employees to form an organization? The reason isn’t that they don’t understand what is at stake. On the contrary, it is that there is too much at stake, and they understand this very well. Workers choose individual strategies because the collective one carries risks and costs that make it seem out of reach. The most severe problem workers face is the enormous power that their employer has over them. If employees try to band together to bargain for a better deal at their job, they know that if their boss suspects what is going on, they are certain to lose the job altogether. As a result, organizers often have to try carrying out their activities in secret. This places enormous practical burdens on them. It’s hard enough trying to bring a large number of people together into one unit. But now they have to do it under the constant threat of being found out by the boss. What makes it worse is that there are often some workers in the establishment who might not stand to gain very much from a union — very highly skilled workers who already command high wages, or workers who have special deals with the boss — and who therefore are not very sympathetic to the idea of a union. Not only do organizers have to somehow convince these skeptics of the merits of collective representation, but they have to do it while hoping that one of the latter doesn’t give them up to the employer. Not surprisingly, the result is that most workers in most every workplace choose to keep their heads down and not take the chance. Even when some brave souls decide to undertake this very risky campaign, they have to deal with the reality that many of their coworkers will prefer not to. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

22

This generic problem of risk-aversion is made worse by the fact that, in much of the world, jobs tend to be very short term. This is particularly so in the Global South, where the vast majority of workers labor in the informal sector, or work under temporary contracts in the formal sector. But it is increasingly the case even in rich countries, where “precarious” work has increased massively in recent decades. When workers are at a job for only a short duration, when they shift from one venue to another, it makes the possibility of organizing them even more remote. The bonds that normally form between them, as they come to know one another over the course of months, now get no chance to develop. They don’t build the friendships and sense of camaraderie that are the bedrock of collective action. Even more, they don’t feel that they have a stake in the particular venue where they happen to be, since they will soon be gone, either to another workplace or to their village if they happen to be migrant workers. Temporary employment makes for a very short-term outlook. So the first obstacle to collective organization is that all efforts to bring it about take place in a pre-existing field of power. Of all the constraints on workers, this is the most important one. Creating a union isn’t like starting up a club. You can’t just walk up to somebody and ask them if they would like to join. The simple act of talking to a coworker about it is likely to create trouble for you, and might even get you and the person you are talking to fired. The reaction on the part of workers is typically to just keep their heads down and stay out of trouble. A second obstacle to creating a workers’ organization is that it makes demands on their resources, which are already stretched very tight. The main such demand isn’t money, though of course that is important. Any kind of organization will ask its members to pay dues of some kind, a request that is never easy for working people. But a monthly dues payment isn’t all that pinches. Also burdensome are the demands that organizing makes on workers’ time. Time is a precious and scarce resource for two reasons. First, it’s the most CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

23

important ingredient that goes into workers’ recuperation from the physical and psychological damage of work. Simply put, whatever else they might do to recover from the fatigue that they suffer from the workplace, there is no substitute for sleep and rest, neither of which can be compressed without diluting its effects. Time is also important for a second reason, in that it is what allows workers to care for all the other needs they have, apart from the need for physical survival — building their social relationships, taking care of family and loved ones, developing their creative abilities, developing new skills, entertaining themselves, etc. To put it somewhat crudely, while rest nourishes the body, these other activities nourish the soul. Putting these two reasons together, we can see why time matters. When workers are asked to participate in an organizing drive, or in activities of an established union, they are being asked to set aside all the other concerns that are crucial to their physical and emotional wellbeing. Not surprisingly, workers often decide that they would rather preserve what time they have and dedicate it to these other priorities; others will realize that they literally don’t have the time to give — they have no choice but to dedicate it to recuperation, or to looking after their children, or to taking care of their home, etc. The third obstacle arises in some measure from the two that we have examined. Owing to the enormous risks and burdens involved in an organizing drive, there is a tendency on the part of many workers to try to pass on the costs to others and to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. What makes this a live possibility is not only the desire to avoid the costs, but also the fact that, if the drive is successful, the benefits that come from it will accrue to all the employees in the workplace, regardless of whether or not they participated. Unions don’t just negotiate for the people who join them or show up for meetings. They bargain for all the workers in the establishment, even those who don’t show up. On the one hand, this makes the union more powerful, because it gives it a wider base of support and CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

24

more leverage against the employer. And it also makes it harder for the employer to use a divide-and-conquer strategy in which she can play off workers who aren’t being represented by the union against those who are. So it’s sensible for organizers to fight for everyone who works in the establishment. But it also creates a problem, in that it generates an incentive for some workers to reduce their own risk and their own contribution to the effort, by letting others shoulder more of the burden. This is called free-riding, and it means what it sounds like — it’s when workers basically let other workers foot the bill, in terms of costs and risk, in the effort to bring the bosses to heel. These are all very real constraints, and together they typically make it entirely reasonable for workers to opt for an individualist survival strategy — just show up for work, mind your business, defend yourself by working only as hard as you have to, compete fiercely when you think it will help, and on some occasions, when it’s safe, even sabotage the whole work process.

FORGING SOLIDARITY The key to social change is for workers to opt for a collective strategy of resistance over an individual one. As we have just seen, it doesn’t happen automatically, since workers have good reason to choose going it alone over banding together. This is why a working class movement depends on conscious and directed organizing. The essence of labor organizing is to create the material and psychological conditions for workers to choose the path of collective struggle.

Solidarity Since the costs and risks of organizing are so prohibitive for the typical worker, organizers understand that a successful strategy depends on minimizing both of them, so workers feel that what is being asked of them is reasonable, and that they have a decent chance of success in CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

25

the job action. This is the function of strike funds, for example. These are pools of money that unions save up so that if they call for a job action, workers will have some source of support. But the fact is that, no matter how much you reduce the risk involved in the campaign, no matter how much you promise to reduce the individual costs, there is always a material burden that the worker has to willingly take on. This is simply built into her class location. If she can be fired for her actions, she will have to accept a level of sacrifice and uncertainty. So collective action requires convincing workers to not make their decisions based on a pure cost-benefit analysis, because on those grounds, the rational move for most people is to opt for putting safety first, and just make the best with what they have. How do you convince workers to willingly take on the sacrifices that come with job actions? The most important ingredient has been the creation of a solidaristic culture. What this means is a feeling of mutual obligation toward one another, so that if one or a group of workers is seen to be taking on some of the risk, the response is to feel a moral obligation to join in, rather than to free-ride. It means inculcating among workers a sense of mutual responsibility over an ethos of individualism. There are a number of ways in which this process has been described — the creation of a common identity, a sense of solidarity, a culture of resistance, and most famously, what Marx called it, the development of a class consciousness. It means that the worker rejects the attitude that other workers are her competitors, and comes to see them as peers. Her very sense of self, her personal identity, now partly includes her social bonds with those peers. This ethos doesn’t typically come about on its own. Of course, there are elements of sympathy and mutual support that are part of working class life. For billions of the laboring poor all over the world, economic survival would be impossible without innumerable acts of support, goodwill and humanity. And these come about from their being thrust into the most horrible circumstances, all of them together, all of them needing one another’s cooperation to survive. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

26

This is true within the workplace and outside it. But it is important to recognize as well the massive pressures that constantly pull them apart, which we described in the previous section. In the everyday operation of the labor market and the workplace, wage laborers do see that they are all in the same situation. But their situation includes having to scratch and claw to find a job over the attempts of others, and to outwork the others so they can keep the job once they have it. In other words, the normal condition of being a worker is to also see the others as competitors, not just as comrades. These are powerful pressures and most workers accept them because to not take them seriously is to risk their very survival. So the creation of solidarity requires conscious intervention to build on the common experiences, and to create institutions that reinforce the feelings of mutuality and common identity. Some of these institutions are social and cultural, others more political. The most successful workers’ organizations always had a rich internal life — of clubs, newspapers, self-help societies, drama groups, literary circles, sports teams, summer schools, child care centers, and many other facets. They created a world of their own, so that their members related to them not only for their political or economic interests, but for their social and familial lives. Children grew up going to socialist summer camp, young people met their future

In a labor force that is now almost fifty percent female, and more than onethird non-white, tackling the prevalence of racial and gender hierarchies is not a luxury or a distraction. CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

27

spouses at union picnics, workers improved their literacy through union-funded adult education classes, and so on. Politics and social life became very closely interwoven, so that when workers joined political campaigns, they felt they were participating with their friends and compatriots, not just their coworkers.

Social hierarchies One of the most important components of solidarity is mutual respect. Each person has to feel that they are valued and their dignity recognized by the people with whom they are joined in struggle. But if this is to be so, racial, gender, caste, or ethnic hierarchies cannot be tolerated within labor organizations. Nobody will remain loyal or take up struggle if they are demeaned, excluded, or placed in subordinate positions within a movement. Hence, campaigns against social oppression of every kind have to be part of the labor movement, and not taken to be something external to it. In recent years, especially in the US, many on the Left have become critical of “identity politics” as a political movement that distracts from deeper issues of class power. Now, it is of course true that what passes for struggles around race, caste, or gender oppression has become focused on very narrow and often symbolic issues. Identity politics, especially on college campuses, often revolves around “micro-aggressions”, symbolic affronts, individual choices, etc. But the fact that a centrally important issue is being reduced to matters of taste and symbolism doesn’t mean that's all there is to the issue. Outside the university, in workplaces and labor organizations, domination on the basis of social identity — real domination, not just the language of it — is not only pervasive, but utterly crippling. In a labor force that is now almost fifty percent female, and more than one-third non-white, tackling the prevalence of racial and gender hierarchies is not a luxury or a distraction — it is one of the most important preconditions for effective labor organizing. CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

28

So denigrating these issues as “mere” identity politics is self-defeating for the labor movement. Of course, that doesn’t mean that any and all forms of these politics are to be embraced. There really are conservative versions of gender and race politics, and in the recent past, these narrower forms have managed to capture the stage. Where once the leaders of the women’s movement and the movement for racial justice saw economic demands as being the key to liberation, insisted on foregrounding the interests of the poor among these groups, and saw themselves as part of the broader anti-capitalist Left, this is no longer the case. But the answer is to show people that unless we return to that broader vision of liberation, in which working women and working class minorities set the agenda rather than elites — unless we return to that, the battle against oppression based on these identities cannot be won. And unless the labor movement takes these issues as central to its own vision, it won’t be able to organize the class it seeks to represent.

Member Control Mutual respect and a vibrant cultural life go a long way toward creating an ethos of solidarity. A third and more formal mechanism has to do with the political structure of the organization. Workers are more likely to sacrifice, to join in and contribute, when they feel that they have actively participated in the decisions taken by their organization. This is only possible if the organization is run on a democratic basis. A culture of democracy requires that: ▪▪ Organizational decisions are taken only after a thorough debate among the members. This is critical because if members feel that decisions are being taken without their input, that they are just being given marching orders without any regard to their views, they will be less likely to expend the time and energy needed for the campaign or the mobilization to succeed. But if decisions CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

29

are undertaken after an open and honest debate, members feel much more committed to them, even if they might feel unhappy with the decision itself. ▪▪ Mechanisms are in place to hold the leadership accountable. Obviously, any organization in which leaders are immune to discipline will not only fail in eliciting members’ enthusiasm, but will very likely degenerate over time. An organization of any size has to put some kind of bureaucratic structures in place — it needs to have officials and staff who work full-time, whose job it is to manage its affairs, and who therefore are to some extent separated from members on an everyday basis. These officers are empowered to negotiate with employers on the organization’s behalf and to also enforce any contracts that the bosses agree to. This gives them a great deal of power, and if unchecked, they will tend to use that power to maintain their own privileges, rather than to represent their members. And as this happens, member commitment and enthusiasm will wane, their willingness to participate will dissipate, and the organization will lose its strength. ▪▪ Member participation has to extend to as many parts of the organization as possible. Offices have to be open and accessible; there should be constant communication both vertically — between leaders and members — and horizontally, between members themselves. The best organizations encourage constant debate and discussion, not just when important decisions are being taken, but on an everyday basis, on all facets of political life — where the organization is going, what its strategy ought to be, how it conducts itself, what its agenda might be, etc. These are just some of the central ingredients of a democratic culture, and there are many more. The point is that a commitment to democracy isn’t just a moral one. It is deeply practical, because a CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

30

rich, democratic culture is the lifeblood of a labor organization. Trade unions are only as strong as their ability to disrupt production. But this ability in turn depends entirely on members’ willingness to contribute and sacrifice, to do the hard work of actually making job actions successful. They will not do so if they feel unconnected to their peers, or if they feel alienated from the organization itself. The response, in those situations, will be to hold back, to free-ride, and to thereby hope that someone else will undertake the efforts to make the campaign successful. But of course, this very orientation will ensure that campaigns cannot succeed, since members increasingly resort to shirking rather than participating. A second reason that democracy is a practical matter is that it is the only way to keep a strong connection between campaigns and member interests. If members feel that campaigns are unconnected to their everyday concerns, if they feel that they are being asked to sacrifice for someone else’s interests — like their officers, for example — or that the goals being pursued are wildly unrealistic, then they will again feel alienated from the organization and less willing to jump in. Democracy is important because it not only connects leaders to members, but it creates an organic link between member interests and organizational decisions. People feel connected to the decisions, not just because they took part in the final outcome, but because the final outcome reflects their real needs and their own assessments of what goals are or aren’t realistic. If we bring all this together, we can sum it up as follows. Working people can defend their interests only if they are organized, and their organizations will succeed only if they are open, member-controlled, built on mutual respect, and culturally vibrant. Above all, they have to be committed to building real power. There is nothing automatic about this process. Workers can rationally choose to stick to an individualistic defense of their interests, and trade unions can be formed, but be top-down and bureaucratic. It takes active and purposive intervention to get unions up and running, and just as much work CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

31

to maintain them as fighting organizations. Because of the relentless pressures that markets impose on them — both on individual members and also on the organization itself — there never comes a point when unions or their members can relax and assume that the hard work is done. There has to be a permanent campaign to keep members engaged, maintain checks on leadership, prevent the ossification of internal structures, renew interpersonal bonds, promote class identities, and most of all, build power at work and outside it.

CLASS POLITICS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE The past few decades have been one of the longest period of quiescence the labor movement has ever seen. No matter how you measure it, the power and influence of the working class has declined, not just in the United States, and not just in the advanced capitalist world, but across the world. This has understandably led to a loss of confidence among progressives, and with that, a tendency to look for political alternatives. In an era when labor politics are losing steam, it’s understandable that in some quarters, the reaction is to look for a new political anchor, or to retreat into individualistic solutions like lifestyle politics, or various forms of self-help, etc. Other political strategies can gain some traction in certain situations. They can work sometimes and for some individuals. But if the ambition is to succeed in achieving significant shifts in income, time and resources for people at any significant scale, political movements discover sooner or later that they have to take on the power of the capitalist class. In modern market societies, the center of economic and political power continues to be capital, and it is the holders of capital who also control the allocation of resources. Any move to significantly redistribute them has to find a way to gain leverage against this group. If you want better wages, they come from your employer; if you need more time at home, you have to negotiate less time at work; if you want a more stable work schedule so you can CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

32

plan your home life, you need to get your boss to agree; if you need better health care, you either negotiate it with your employer, or you pressure the state to provide it; if you need child care, you acquire it via higher wages, or state provision, both of which lead you to your employer’s social power; if you want a pension, you either get it from your employer, or you pressure the state — and so on. At every turn, for the fundamental goods that go into a decent life, all roads lead to the economic and political power of capital. You either have to extract them from the employer class directly, or from its henchmen in the state, who take their cues from capital. The lesson is clear — as long as capital remains the arbiter of people’s fate, any social movement with a real ambition for justice will have to find a way of gaining leverage against it. And this is why, as long as we are within capitalism, working people have to remain at the core of political strategy. There is simply no other social force with the capacity to take on the employer class and the state. This simple fact has enormous implications, not just for “class” demands, but for the pursuit of social justice more generally, which includes the fight against other social oppressions. In recent years, many intellectuals have accused socialists of being indifferent to race and gender domination. Their view is that since race and gender can’t be reduced to class, arguing for the primacy of class amounts to ignoring the plight of women and racial minorities. But this criticism is based on a fallacy. The fact that race and gender oppression can’t be reduced to class oppression doesn’t mean that they can be remedied independently of class mobilization. As we said earlier, any reform movement that aims at a significant redistribution of income or economic resources, any call for significantly changing the state’s spending priorities, will have to confront the power of capital — which includes movements around gender and race. Consider the situation of racial minorities. A program to seriously address the subordination of blacks and Latinos in the United States, or Arabs and Africans in Europe, cannot succeed unless it prioritizes CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

33

massive programs for jobs, health care, education and housing. But where will these come from? All of them will entail a significant redirection of state spending, away from corporate handouts, defense spending, and tax breaks for the rich. This being the case, any movement that foregrounds these demands will have to find a way to change the state’s current priorities — which are set by the wealthy and by owners of capital. And capitalists are not going to stand idly by while the state enacts far-reaching policies for public housing, free health care, etc. So too, a feminist movement that proposes a nationwide program of state-provided child care, family leave, etc. will call for the same sorts of changes in policy that anti-racist movements demand. Without such demands, both of these movements become movements of rich minorities and women — those members of these groups who don’t need free health care, can hire their own child care workers, or can send their kids to private schools. If struggles for racial and gender justice are going to represent the interests of all women and minorities, not just the well-off ones, then they have to call for a massive redistribution of economic resources, whether directly through higher wages, or indirectly through state provision. And their ability to do so will depend entirely on their ability to build the kind of social power that only the labor movement has ever been able to provide. Hence, the traditional Left commitment to class struggle as the center of its political strategy is not only sound, but necessary. There is no garden path to getting the labor movement going again. Maybe it will come out of the public sector; maybe strong electoral mobilizations will get it going; it might take inspiration from immigrant rights movements. There isn’t a ten-step program to re-energizing labor organizing. But wherever it comes from, however it is built, it remains the central ingredient for success. Our power to achieve progress toward a more humane society still rides on the power of working people.

CATALYST — THE ABCS OF CAPITALISM

34

$5.00

The ABCs of Socialism

The ABCs of Socialism was produced as a collaboration between Verso Books and Jacobin magazine, which is released online and quarterly in print to over 15,000 subscribers. If you’re interested in the ideas in this book, join a Jacobin reading group in over seventy cities across the world. Visit www.jacobinmag.com/reading-groups/ for more details.

The ABCs of Socialism

EDITED BY

Bhaskar Sunkara ILLUSTR ATED BY

Phil Wrigglesworth

First published by Verso 2016 © Jacobin Foundation Ltd. All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-726-4 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Antwerp by A2-Type Printed in the US by Sheridan Press

Among hundreds of others, this book was made possible by the generosity of: Saki Bailey Danny Bates John Erganian Marshall Mayer David Mehan Mark Ó Dochartaigh Brian Skiffington Frederick Sperounis Francis Tseng Nathan Zimmerman Special thanks to the Anita L. Mishler Education Fund ([email protected])

www.jacobinmag.com/?p=12345

Article Title Author  •  Jacobin  •  Date

This book contains in-text annotations for further reading. Some annotations contain hyperlink information for direct reference to articles in Jacobin’s online archive. Simply copy the digits included in the annotation to the end of the following URL for related articles:

12345

About the Authors Nicole Aschoff is the managing editor at Jacobin and the author of The New Prophets of Capital. Alyssa Battistoni is an editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in political science at Yale University. Jonah Birch is a graduate student in sociology at New York University and a contributing editor at Jacobin. Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University. His latest book is Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Danny Katch is a contributor to Socialist Worker and the author of Socialism ... Seriously. Chris Maisano is a contributing editor at Jacobin and a union staffer in New York. Nivedita Majumdar is an associate professor of English at John Jay College. She is the secretary of the Professional Staff Congress, the CUNY faculty and staff union. Michael A. McCarthy is an assistant professor of sociology at Marquette University. Joseph M. Schwartz is the national vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and professor of political science at Temple University. Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant professor in Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Adaner Usmani is a graduate student at New York University and on the board of New Politics. Erik Olin Wright is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His latest book is Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy.

10 Isn’t America already kind of socialist?

But at least capitalism is free and democratic, right?

12

22

Socialism sounds good in theory, but doesn’t human nature make it impossible to realize?

30

70 What about racism? Don’t socialists only care about class?

Aren’t socialism and feminism sometimes in conflict?

82 104

Are socialists pacifists? Aren’t some wars justified?

Wouldn’t a more democratic world just mean a bigger environmental crisis?

94

Contents

Introduction

36 Don’t the rich deserve to keep most of their money?

Will socialists take my Kenny Loggins records?

52

46

Doesn’t socialism always end up in dictatorship?

Is socialism a Western concept?

62

Why do socialists talk so much about workers?

120

128

Will socialism be boring?

A little more than a century ago, socialism might not have been a mass force in American politics, but it seemed destined to become one. In 1912, the Socialist Party won almost a million votes in the presidential election, had a membership of 120,000, and elected more than a thousand socialists to office. Mayors of cities like Berkeley, Flint, Milwaukee, and Schenectady were all socialists. So was a congressman, Victor Berger, and dozens of state officials. That year, Oklahoma alone was home to eleven socialist weeklies. And in clusters of the country — from the Jewish enclaves of the Lower East Side to the mining towns of the West — the “cooperative commonwealth” was the dream to which all other political appeals were compared. That commonwealth never came into being, and the decades that followed would be less kind to the Left. There were still upsurges and victories, of course, and socialists acquitted themselves well, helping build campaigns against oppression and exploitation. But as we entered the twenty-first century, socialism in the United States felt less like a live 10

current and more like a dying piece of American history. With the emergence of the Bernie Sanders campaign and new movements for democracy and freedom, this may be beginning to change. The events of this year all point to the emergence of “Sanders Democrats,” a group that is disproportionately young and calling for massive redistributions of wealth and power. Sanders is only the beginning; this force will continue struggling for a different sort of politics. Over the past six months, we’ve had more conversations about socialism with friends and strangers alike than in the last six years. Jacobin’s subscriber rolls have increased by hundreds every week, and our inbox is flooded with emails asking basic definitional questions about socialism. We don’t have all the answers, but this book was made to help tackle some of them. The ABCs of Socialism will be useful for years to come — not only as a primer for future generations of radicals, but also as an artifact of a time when the socialist left was once again filled with promise. How this story ends is up to us. The ABCs of Socialism

11

Isn’t America already kind of socialist?

Chris Maisano

If you spend much time on social media, you’ve probably seen the memes purporting to show just how socialist the United States already is by listing a bunch of government programs, services, and agencies. There are many variations on the theme, but my favorite one lists no less than fifty-five ostensibly socialist programs whose only commonality is that Uncle Sam carries them all out. Some directly serve social needs and involve some measure of income redistribution (public libraries, welfare, the wic program, Social Security, food stamps). Some seem thrown in for no good reason at all (Amber Alerts? The White House?). Others are basic operational activities that any modern government, regardless of its ideological orientation, would carry out (the census, fire departments, garbage and snow removal, sewers, street lighting). And still others involve the vast apparatus of coercion and force (police departments, the The ABCs of Socialism

13

fbi, the cia, the military, courts, prisons, and jails). For all of Bernie Sanders’s virtues, his campaign for president has only thickened the fog of ideological confusion. At one campaign stop last year, he endorsed the thinking behind the most simplistic of these memes: “When you go to your public library, when you call your fire department or the police department, what do you think you’re calling? These are socialist institutions.” By that logic any sort of collective project funded by tax dollars and accomplished through government action is socialism. It’s not difficult to see the problem with this line of thinking. In a country as deeply and reflexively anti-statist as the United States, the identification of socialism with government is perhaps the worst possible rhetorical strategy the Left could adopt. “Like the dmv? Then You’ll Love Socialism!” isn’t a slogan that will win many converts. More importantly, conflating all government action with socialism forces us to defend many of the most objectionable forms of state activity, including 14

The Making of the American Police State Christian Parenti  •  Jacobin  •  7.28.2015

So long as the fundamental structures of the economy remain unchanged, state action will disproportionately benefit capitalist interests at the expense of everything else.

23608

Isn’t America already kind of socialist?

those that we would want to abolish in a free and just society. It’s one thing to identify public libraries with socialism. They operate according to democratic principles of access and distribution, providing services to all regardless of one’s ability to pay. They would be one of the most important institutions in any socialist society worthy of the name. But it’s quite another to include the police. If the forces responsible for killing Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd exemplify socialism in action, then no person who wants freedom and justice should be a socialist. The idea that any government activity is synonymous with socialism has major political and strategic implications. After all, if our country were already at least partly socialist, then all we would have to do is keep gradually expanding government. We wouldn’t have to change the purpose of any existing programs, nor would we have to reform the administrative structures of government agencies. And because all of those purportedly socialist programs have been won without fundamentally challenging private property, there would be no need for a decisive confrontation with the owners of capital and their political allies. All we would have to do is elect sympathetic politicians to office and let them legislate their way to even more socialism. Academics who study politics for a living often fall into this trap. By simply looking at the size of government in terms of overall spending, many argue that the US is becoming increasingly socialist whether it wants to or not. In their view major social reforms will happen willy-nilly, with a The ABCs of Socialism

15

16

16716

Capitalism’s Gravediggers Ellen Meiksins Wood  •  Jacobin  •  12.5.2014

passive populace coming to support successful programs only after they have been legislated by politicians and implemented by bureaucrats. Government spending on social programs and other activities may well increase in the coming decades because of the aging population, the climate crisis, and other developments. But the sheer volume of spending tells us little about the political valence of government action. Key questions about that state activity always need to be asked: does it reinforce or undermine the power of those who own capital? Does it increase our subordination to market discipline or offer us more freedom from its demands? There have been a number of large-scale government initiatives since the 1980s, even during periods of Republican political dominance. But many of the biggest programs over the last few decades do nothing to strengthen the power of workers. The Earned Income Tax Credit (eitc) has brought much-needed relief to the working poor, but it also serves as an indirect subsidy for low-wage employers. Medicare Part D offers some subsidies to low-income seniors, but it’s widely recognized as a costly giveaway to the prescription drug industry. Obamacare has increased health insurance coverage, partially through the (contested) expansion of Medicaid. But the individual mandate only serves to deepen marketization, adding millions of Americans to the private, for-profit insurance system. The 2009 stimulus plan likely saved the country from another Great Depression, but it was inadequate to the scale of the crisis and weighted in favor of

Isn’t America already kind of socialist?

tax cuts for businesses who simply pocketed the cash instead of hiring new workers. The list goes on. Why does this happen? For one thing, the rich and powerful invest heavily in political activity to promote their interests and block progressive reforms. By the end of last year, the contributions of just 158 families and the companies they own (a staggering $176 million) made up about half the total funding in the 2016 presidential race. Through their political spending and the influence it buys, they have been able to shape tax and other policies for their own benefit, an advantage reinforced by favorable judicial decisions (e.g. Citizens United) and lobbying activities. According to a widely noted 2014 study by two political scientists, the political dominance of the wealthy is now so pronounced that average citizens exercise “near zero” influence over government policymaking. The middle and upper classes also hold the most important posts in government, elected and appointed alike. They share a common set of ideas and values predicated on protecting the status quo and repressing any major challenge to that system, particularly those that come from the working class and the Left. These direct forms of influence are not the only way that powerful interests shape government action. After all, governments are dependent on some minimally robust level of economic activity to fund themselves. The tax revenues or debt financing governments rely on are directly related to the state of the capitalist economy and its rates of growth and profitability. If the level of economic activity declines — perhaps, because capitalists are unhappy about new The ABCs of Socialism

17

18

28175

The Business Veto Shawn Gude  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 20

legislation that benefits workers — the state will find it increasingly difficult to fund its activities. This in turn leads to a decline in its legitimacy and its level of popular support. Because economic activity is significantly determined by the investment decisions of private capitalists, these forces can essentially veto government policies that they think are against their interests. Often, if capitalists aren’t induced to make investments through business subsidies and other incentives, they simply will refuse to invest. Consequently, there is a strong tendency for politicians and bureaucrats to align their policy decisions with the interests of capitalists in the private sector. Preserving “business confidence” is a major constraint on the formation of policy, and is one of the main reasons why government action is so often favorable to capitalist interests. It’s also how they’re able to conflate their own interests with a larger “public” or “national” interest — under a capitalist system, there’s some truth to their claim. In the absence of popular organization and militancy, government action will do little to shift the balance of power away from capital and toward labor, or to undermine market discipline instead of deepening it. So long as the fundamental structures of the economy remain unchanged, state action will disproportionately benefit capitalist interests at the expense of everything else. This is not to say that progressive reforms can never be won under capitalism, or that the government is completely immune to public pressure. However, such reforms

Isn’t America already kind of socialist?

In the absence of popular organization and militancy, government action will do little to shift the balance of power away from capital and toward labor.

have only been won with the support of direct, mass struggles against employers. Simply electing politicians to office or watching the government expand by its own momentum has never been, and never will be, enough. Economic power is political power, and under capitalism the owners of capital will always have the capacity to undermine popular democracy — no matter who’s in Congress or the White House. Winning government power and using it to break the dominance of the capitalist class is a necessary condition for beginning the transition to socialism. A government run by a socialist party (or a coalition of left and working-class parties) would move to bring the economy’s key industries and enterprises under some form of social control. But that alone wouldn’t be sufficient. The bitter experiences of the twentieth century have taught us that socialism won’t further the cause of human freedom if the political and administrative structures of government aren’t thoroughly democratized. The ABCs of Socialism

19

Here is where continued popular mobilization outside (and, if necessary, against) formal political structures becomes absolutely crucial. In order to withstand the inevitable backlash from capitalist and conservative forces, a socialist transition would need to draw on mass popular support and direct participation in the affairs of government. This would entail not only creating directly democratic bodies that supplant or complement representative institutions like Congress, but dramatically overhauling state agencies and administrative structures. Such an expansion of popular power would be needed to both push out personnel committed to the old regime and to transform the often alienating and repressive bureaucracies that currently administer public services. Public schools, welfare departments, planning agencies, courts, and all other government agencies would invite workers and recipients to participate in the design and implementation of those services. Public-sector unions could play a key role in this endeavor, organizing both the providers and users of public services to radically transform the administrative structures of government. Only under these conditions would government activity be synonymous with democratic socialism. Instead of posing an abstract concept of “government” against the forces of capital, we should begin the hard work of conceiving and building new institutions that can make government of the people, by the people, and for the people a reality.  ■

20

No, socialism isn’t just more government —  it’s about democratic ownership and control.

But at least capitalism is free and democratic, right?

In the United States, many take for granted that freedom and democracy are inextricably connected with capitalism. Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, went so far as to argue that capitalism was a necessary condition for both. It is certainly true that the appearance and spread of capitalism brought with it a tremendous expansion of individual freedoms and, eventually, popular struggles for more democratic forms of political organization. The claim that capitalism fundamentally obstructs both freedom and democracy will then sound strange to many. To say that capitalism restricts the flourishing of these values is not to argue that capitalism has run counter to freedom and democracy in every instance. Rather, through the functioning of its most basic processes, capitalism generates severe deficits of both freedom and democracy that it can never remedy. Capitalism has promoted The ABCs of Socialism

The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View Ellen Meiksins Wood  •  Verso, 2002

Erik Olin Wright

23

the emergence of certain limited forms of freedom and democracy, but it imposes a low ceiling on their further realization. At the core of these values is selfdetermination: the belief that people should be able to decide the conditions of their own lives to the fullest extent possible. When an action by a person affects only that person, then he or she ought to be able to engage in that activity without asking permission from anyone else. This is the context of freedom. But when an action affects the lives of others, then these other people should have a say in the activity. This is the context of democracy. In both, the paramount concern is that people retain as much control as possible over the shape their lives will take. In practice, virtually every choice a person makes will have some effect on others. It is impossible for everyone to contribute to every decision that concerns them, and any social system that insisted on such comprehensive democratic participation would impose an unbearable burden on people. What we need, therefore, is a set of rules to distinguish between questions of freedom and those of democracy. In our society, such a distinction is usually made with reference to the boundary between the private and public spheres. There is nothing natural or spontaneous about this line between the private and the public; it is forged and maintained by social processes. The tasks entailed by these processes are complex and often contested. The state vigorously enforces some public/private boundaries and leaves others to be upheld or dissolved as social norms. Often the boundary between the public and the private remains fuzzy. In 24

But at least capitalism is free and democratic, right?

a fully democratic society, the boundary itself is subject to democratic deliberation. Capitalism constructs the boundary between the public and private spheres in a way that constrains the realization of true individual freedom and reduces the scope of meaningful democracy. There are five ways in which this is readily apparent.

Capitalism is anchored in the private accumulation of wealth and the pursuit of income through the market. The economic inequalities that result from these “private” activities are intrinsic to capitalism and create inequalities in what the philosopher Philippe van Parijs calls “real freedom.” Whatever else we might mean by freedom, it must include the ability to say “no.” A wealthy person can freely decide not to work for wages; a poor person without an independent means of livelihood cannot do so easily. But the value of freedom goes deeper than this. It is also the ability to act positively on one’s life plans — to choose not just an answer, but the question itself. The children of wealthy parents can take unpaid internships to advance their careers; the children of poor parents cannot. Capitalism deprives many people of real freedom in this sense. Poverty in the midst of plenty exists because of a direct equation between material resources and the resources needed for self-determination.

In the Name of Love Miya Tokumitsu  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 13

1. “Work or Starve” Isn’t Freedom

9534

2. Capitalists Decide The way the boundary between the public and private spheres is drawn in capitalism The ABCs of Socialism

25

excludes crucial decisions, which affect large numbers of people, from democratic control. Perhaps the most fundamental right that accompanies private ownership of capital is the right to decide to invest and disinvest strictly on the basis of self-interest. A corporation’s decision to move production from one place to another is a private matter, even though it makes a radical impact on the lives of everyone in both places. Even if one argues that this concentration of power in private hands is necessary for the efficient allocation of resources, the exclusion of these kinds of decisions from democratic control unequivocally decimates the capacity for self-determination by all except the owners of capital. 3. Nine to Five Is Tyranny Capitalist firms are allowed to be organized as workplace dictatorships. An essential component of a business owner’s power is the right to tell employees what to do. That is the basis of the employment contract: the job seeker agrees to follow the employer’s orders in exchange for a wage. Of course, an employer is also free to grant workers considerable autonomy, and in some situations this is the profitmaximizing way of organizing work. But such autonomy is given or withheld at the owner’s pleasure. No robust conception of self-determination would allow autonomy to depend on the private preferences of elites. A defender of capitalism might reply that a worker who doesn’t like the boss’s rule can always quit. But since workers 26

But at least capitalism is free and democratic, right?

4. Governments Have to Serve the Interests of Private Capitalists Private control over major investment decisions creates a constant pressure on public authorities to enact rules favorable to the interests of capitalists. The threat of disinvestment and capital mobility is always in the background of public policy discussions, and thus politicians, whatever their ideological orientation, are forced to worry about sustaining a “good business climate.” Democratic values are hollow so long as one class of citizens takes priority over all others.

Social Democracy’s Incomplete Legacy Chris Maisano  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 6

by definition lack an independent means of livelihood, if they quit they will have to look for a new job and, to the extent that the available employment is in capitalist firms, they will still be subject to a boss’s dictates.

1221

5. Elites Control the Political System Finally, wealthy people have greater access than others to political power. This is the case in all capitalist democracies, although wealth-based inequality of political power is much greater in some countries than in others. The specific mechanisms for this greater access are quite varied: contributions to political campaigns; financing lobbying efforts; elite social networks of various sorts; and outright bribes and other forms of corruption. In the United States it is not only wealthy individuals, but also capitalist corporations, that face no meaningful restriction on their The ABCs of Socialism

27

ability to deploy private resources for political purposes. This differential access to political power voids the most basic principle of democracy.

● ● ●

These consequences are endemic to capitalism as an economic system. This does not mean that they cannot sometimes be mitigated in capitalist societies. In different times and places, many policies have been erected to compensate for capitalism’s deformation of freedom and democracy. Public constraints can be imposed on private investment in ways that erode the rigid boundary between the public and private; a strong public sector and active forms of state investment can weaken the threat of capital mobility; restrictions on the use of private wealth in elections and the public finance of political campaigns can reduce the privileged access of the wealthy to political power; labor law can strengthen the collective power of workers in both the political arena and the workplace; and a wide variety of welfare policies can increase the real freedom of those without access to private wealth. When the political conditions are right, the anti-democratic and freedom-impeding features of capitalism can be palliated, but they cannot be eliminated. Taming capitalism in this way has been the central objective of the policies advocated by socialists within capitalist economies the world over. But if freedom and democracy are to be fully realized, capitalism must not merely be tamed. It must be overcome. 

28

It might seem that way, but genuine freedom and democracy aren’t compatible with capitalism.

Socialism sounds good in theory, but doesn’t human nature make it impossible to realize?

Adaner Usmani & Bhaskar Sunkara

“Good   in theory, bad in practice.” People who profess interest in socialism and the idea of a society without exploitation and hierarchy are often met with this dismissive reply. Sure, the concept sounds nice, but people aren’t very nice, right? Isn’t capitalism much more suited to human nature — a nature dominated by competitiveness and venality? Socialists don’t believe these truisms. They don’t view history as a mere chronicle of cruelty and selfishness. They also see countless acts of empathy, reciprocity, and love. People are complex: they do unspeakable things, but they also engage in remarkable acts of kindness and, even in difficult situations, show deep regard for others. This does not mean that we’re plastic — that there is no such thing as human nature. Progressives do sometimes make this claim, often arguing with those who see people as walking, talking utility-maximizers. The ABCs of Socialism

31

Despite its good intentions, this reproach goes too far. For at least two reasons, socialists are committed to the view that all humans share some important interests. The first is a moral one. Socialists’ indictment of how today’s societies fail to provide necessities like food and shelter in a world of plenty, or stunt the development of people locked into thankless, grueling, low-paying jobs, rests on a core belief (stated or not) about the impulses and interests that animate people everywhere. Our outrage that individuals are denied the right to live free and full lives is anchored in the idea that people are inherently creative and curious, and that capitalism too often stifles these qualities. Simply put, we strive for a freer and more fulfilling world because everyone, everywhere, cares about their freedom and fulfillment. But this is not the only reason why socialists are interested in humanity’s universal drives. Having a conception of human nature also helps us make sense of the world around us. And by helping us to interpret the world, it aids our efforts to change it, as well.

We strive for a freer and more fulfilling world because everyone, everywhere, cares about their freedom and fulfilment.

32

Does human nature makes socialism impossible?

One of our principal tasks as socialists is to help make collective action a viable choice for even more people.

The ABCs of Socialism

12043

The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels  •  1848

Marx famously said that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Resistance to exploitation and oppression is a constant throughout history — it is as much a part of human nature as competitiveness, or greed. The world around us is filled with instances of people defending their lives and dignity. And while social structures may shape and constrain individual agency, there are no structures that steamroll people’s rights and freedoms without inviting resistance. Of course, the history of all “hitherto existing society” is also a record of passivity and even acquiescence. Mass collective action against exploitation and oppression is rare. If humans everywhere are committed to defending their individual interests, why don’t we resist more? Well, the view that all people have incentives to demand freedom and fulfillment does not imply that they will always have the capacity to do so. Changing the world is no easy feat. Under ordinary circumstances, the risks associated with acting collectively often seem overwhelming. For example, workers who choose to join a union or go on strike to improve their working conditions may invite the scrutiny of their bosses and even lose their jobs.

33

34

Uniting the Dispossessed Bryan D. Palmer  •  Jacobin  •  7.22.2015

23500

23847

The Second American Revolution Bruce Levine  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 18

Collective action requires many different individuals to decide to take these risks together, so it’s not surprising that it is uncommon and mostly fleeting. Put differently, socialists don’t believe that the absence of mass movements is a sign that people have no inherent desire to fight back, or worse, that they don’t even recognize what their interests are. Rather, protest is uncommon because people are smart. They know that in the present political moment change is a risky, distant hope, so they develop other strategies to get by. But sometimes people do step up and take risks. They organize and build progressive movements from below. History is filled with examples of people fighting against exploitation, and one of our principal tasks as socialists is to support these movements, to help make collective action a viable choice for even more people. In this effort — and the struggle to define the values of a more just society — we will be aided, not hurt, by our shared nature.  ■

Our shared nature actually helps us build and define the values of a more just society.

Don’t the rich deserve to keep most of their money?

Michael A. McCarthy

Tech tycoons, beloved entertainers, and dazzling athletes nearly always come up in heated debates over taxes. Don’t you like your iPod? What about Harry Potter? Neoliberal economists argue that figures like Steve Jobs, J. K. Rowling, and LeBron James should make more money than the rest of us. After all, we — the consumers — are the ones buying their products. Their higher pay creates the incentive necessary for the hard work and innovation that even the lazy among us benefit from. Intuitive as it may seem, this view doesn’t hold up. Advocates for low taxes on the wealthy deliberately choose examples from tech and entertainment, suggesting that the elite are great innovators truly cut from a different cloth. But a glance at the list of the top paid ceos in the United States tells us otherwise. The highest paid executive is Discovery Communications’ David Zaslav, who made over $150 million in 2014. His great contribution to the The ABCs of Socialism

37

The socialist justification for taxes is grounded in a view — not often captured in opinion polls — about how capitalist wealth is actually created.

human endeavor? Helping to air “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” Most people understand this and believe the rich should pay more in taxes. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, 62 percent believe that upper-income earners are taxed “too little,” while just 25 percent think they pay their “fair share.” 69 percent believe corporations aren’t taxed enough, while only 16 percent were content with current rates. But the socialist justification for taxes is grounded in a view — not often captured in opinion polls — about how capitalist wealth is actually created. To explore it, we first need to understand what taxes are and what non-socialists think about them. Tax policy does two things in capitalist society. First, it determines what share of the total economic pie will be managed by the public, in the form of government revenue, and how much will be left to the use of private actors like individuals and corporations. Second, it stipulates how that public share is divvied up between the competing needs and wants of individuals, organizations, and corporations. The first is about resource control while the second is a matter of allocation. 38

Don’t the rich deserve to keep most of their money?

The ABCs of Socialism

20206

Red Innovation Tony Smith  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 17

Even when a government takes in high tax revenue, it does not necessarily put it to progressive ends. Just consider the huge benefits that flow to corporations through subsidies or state-supported research and development, and it’s easy to see how governments can redistribute up, down, or horizontally. In a capitalist economy, where productive resources remain privately owned, socialists call for a significant portion of the social product to be controlled publicly and democratically redistributed downward. However, in the United States today, the libertarian view that “taxation is theft” has seeped so deeply into everyday conceptions of property that even those who support progressive taxation often accept the premise that there is a pre-tax income that people earn and should own outright. Even the liberal credo that everyone needs to “do their fair share” is based on the implicit idea that workers and capital alike pay taxes out of a civic obligation to give up part of what is theirs for the betterment of society. On the same grounds, libertarians argue that if pre-tax income is the direct product of a person or corporation’s own effort, it should be theirs to use as they see fit. In this view, even if the government has decided democratically to tax the rich at a higher rate, taxation remains fundamentally unjust. In the extreme formulation of libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick, “taxation of earnings from labor is on par with forced labor.” That viewpoint has been rightly criticized by progressives. But socialists should not fall back on the common liberal criterion for taxation: that a person or corporation’s ability to pay should

39

40

12084

The Limits of Libertarianism Corey Robin  •  Jacobin  •  7.12.2014

determine the amount they pay. The familiar justification circulates even among leftists, who hear within it an echo of the dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” This perspective suggests one of two things, both of which are inaccurate. First, that taxes are a kind of necessary evil for those that are being taxed. Even though a person or corporation’s pre-tax income is the result of their own labor, it’s more practical for society to tax some of that income for public purposes than to leave it under private control. Or, alternatively, that taxing the rich more is just being fair. Both of these views get us tangled back in the libertarian thicket — doesn’t such a tax policy still encroach on the rights of the individual? Should fairness then trump individual rights? And doesn’t the socialist argument for heavy progressive taxation ultimately also violate the rights of the individual as well? Why do socialists hate freedom so much? The socialist view of redistribution within a capitalist society must reject an important premise at play in nearly all tax policy debates: that pre-tax income is something earned solely by individual effort and possessed privately before the state intervenes to take a part of it. Once we break from this libertarian fantasy, it’s easy to see that individual and corporate income is made possible only through tax-financed state action. The capitalist economy is not selfregulating. The first precondition for firms to earn profits is state-enforced property rights, which give some people ownership and control over productive resources while excluding others. Second, governments

Don’t the rich deserve to keep most of their money?

have to manage labor markets to help ensure that the skill needs of firms are met. States do this through setting immigration and education policies. All capitalist states also try to mitigate labor market risks, whether it be the risk of labor scarcity for firms or unemployment for workers. Third, most capitalists want states to enforce anti-trust, contract, criminal, property, and tort laws, as it makes market interactions more predictable and reliable. And finally, the capitalist economy needs a working infrastructure. Even most libertarians argue that state control over the money supply and interest rates is necessary to spur or slow growth when the economy needs it. All of this is done with taxes. In short, the very notion of pre-tax income or profits is a bookkeeping trick. A person’s income or a corporation’s profits are in part the result of governments collecting taxes and actively creating the conditions under which they were able to make money in the first place. In this framework, “tax the rich” isn’t merely a cry of spite or a demand for fairness. The socialist case for taxation and progressive redistribution is built from three basic factors of how capitalism works. First, as just explored, personal incomes and corporate profits are not simply the result of individual work and business competition — instead they are part of a broader social product. The total income generated in a capitalist society is the result of a collective social effort, made possible by a specific social and legal architecture, and channeled through both publicly funded and privately controlled and financed institutions. Second, the class inequality that results from making this social product The ABCs of Socialism

41

42

The Right to a Dignified Life Jesse A. Myerson  •  Jacobin  •  8.4.2015

is relational. Capitalists are able to accumulate large stores of wealth only because workers do not. All things being equal, firms can raise their profits in inverse proportion to the labor costs they bear. The condition for this relationship is, once again, political and maintained through tax revenue. Firms rely on states to enforce property rights and contracts that keep ownership of society’s productive resources — its means of production — in the hands of very few. As a result, in capitalism, most people work for others; they don’t hire others to work for them. And capitalists employ workers only when they believe that those workers’ efforts are going to make the firm more money than they will take out in wages — doing otherwise would be market suicide. Of course, hard work, guile, and luck afford some workers the ability to become capitalists. But the basic structure of capitalism, in which a small number own most of the productive assets, guarantees that the vast majority of people will (at best) spend their lives earning wages, but never profits. Taxation provides a partial remedy to that essential, structural inequality of capitalist society. Third, redistribution through taxation is a means of extending individual freedom — not curtailing it, as libertarians contend. Freedom, according to the liberal theorist Isaiah Berlin, has a dual composition. On one side, there is negative freedom, the absence of coercion or “freedom from” that is the hallmark of most common conceptions of freedom in the United States today. With respect to coercion, taxes fund a variety of public provisions that offer citizens some measure of freedom from the private tyranny of firms. They form the

23818

Don’t the rich deserve to keep most of their money?

entire basis of the state apparatus that, in a capitalist system, is the only force whose power exceeds that of the capitalist class as a whole. Without laws prohibiting slavery, written by legislatures and enforced in courts sustained by the public coffers, people would be compelled by threat of violence or starvation to work for no money at all. Without regulations, like those that demand at least minimal workplace safety or the ones that compel management to engage in collective bargaining, workers would lose what little say they have in how their work is organized. In the context of tax policy, however, positive freedom matters as well. Positive freedom is the “ability to” — the capacity to do things, and the possibility of selecting goals and making efforts to realize them. Such freedom requires resources. In capitalist societies with low levels of redistribution, positive freedom is a zero-sum game in which a few enjoy a great deal of such abilities at the expense of many others. Tax policy that divides the social product in such a way that allows some people to live opulent lives while others scrape by cannot be said to promote freedom. The public education system, for example, which offers citizens the opportunity to develop knowledge and skills in pursuit of both collective The ABCs of Socialism

The Truth About Finance Stephen Maher  •  Jacobin  •  1.5.2016

The very notion of pre-tax income or profits is a bookkeeping trick.

27860

43

44

What Obamacare Can’t Do Adam Gaffney  •  Jacobin  •  2.11.2016

and individual ambitions, is a bedrock of positive freedom that can only be sustained through taxation. In a truly socialist society, the combination of political and economic equality would offer everyone a far greater degree of both negative and positive freedom than they enjoy under capitalism. Until we realize that world, progressive redistribution through taxation is both a means to redress structural inequalities and the primary way we can expand and extend freedom to as many people as possible. But we are headed down the wrong path. Over the past few decades, financial gains from growing labor productivity have primarily flowed to the top while tax rates on top earners have been drastically lowered and now approach pre–New Deal levels. Even a modest increase in the total tax burden on the top 1 percent of earners to a 45 percent rate, far lower than its postwar levels, would bring in an additional $275 billion in revenue. That’s far more than just the $47 billion needed to make all public colleges and universities tuition free. Such increases also go a long way in generating the revenue needed to finance a universal health care system, increase Social Security benefits, and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.  Most would agree that we all deserve to live in a society where we are given what we deserve, are free, and have the capacity to be creative and reach our potential. As unglamorous as it may seem, redistributive taxation is a step in this direction. The rich didn’t earn their wealth — they’re just holding on to it for us.  ■

28787

Wealth is socially created — redistribution just allows more people to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Will socialists take my Kenny Loggins records?

Bhaskar Sunkara

John Lennon’s iconic 1971 single “Imagine” asks listeners to envision a world without possessions, one without greed or hunger, in which the Earth’s treasures are shared by all humanity. It’s not surprising that the song became an anthem for generations of dreamers, but it also captures something about the socialist vision — the powerful desire to end misery and oppression, and help every person reach their fullest potential. But the picture painted by Lennon’s song might be a bit worrying for those of us who don’t want a world without personal possessions — a sort of global commune where we’re forced to wear hemp bracelets and share our Kenny Loggins records. Thankfully, socialists are not interested in collectivizing your music. It’s not because we don’t love Loggins. We simply don’t want a world without personal property — the things meant for individual consumption. Instead, socialists strive for The ABCs of Socialism

47

48

A Labor Movement That Takes Sides Lois Weiner  •  Jacobin  •  9.7.2015

a society without private property — the things that give the people who own them power over those who don’t. The power created by private property is expressed most clearly in the labor market, where business owners get to decide who deserves a job and who doesn’t, and are able to impose working conditions that, if given a fair alternative, ordinary people would otherwise reject. And even though workers do most of the actual work at a job, owners have unilateral say over how profits are divided up and don’t compensate employees for all the value they produce. Socialists call this phenomenon exploitation. Exploitation is not unique to capitalism. It’s around in any class society, and simply means that some people are compelled to labor under the direction of, and for the benefit of, others. Compared to systems of slavery or serfdom, the hardships many workers face today are less immediately obvious. In most countries they have real legal protections and can afford basic necessities — a result of battles won by labor movements to limit the scope and intensity of exploitation. But exploitation is only ever mitigated in capitalism, never eliminated. Consider this (admittedly abstract) example: let’s say that you’re getting paid $15 an hour by a business owner in a stable, profitable firm. You’ve been working there five years, and you put in about sixty hours a week. No matter what your job is like — whether it’s easy or grueling, boring or exciting — one thing is certain: your labor is making more (probably a lot more) than $15 an hour for your boss. That persistent difference between what you produce and

24811

Will socialists take my Kenny Loggins records?

The ABCs of Socialism

5487

Chasing Utopia Sam Gindin  •  Jacobin  •  3.10.2016

what you get back in return is exploitation — a key source of profits and wealth in capitalism. And, of course, with your paycheck you’re forced to buy all the things necessary for a good life — housing, health care, childcare, a college education — which are also commodities, produced by other workers who are not fully remunerated for their efforts either. Radically changing things would mean taking away the source of capitalists’ power: the private ownership of property. In a socialist society — even one in which markets are retained in spheres like consumer goods — you and your fellow workers wouldn’t spend your day making others rich. You would keep much more of the value you produced. This could translate into more material comfort, or, alternatively, the possibility of deciding to work less with no loss in compensation so you could go to school or take up a hobby. This might seem like a pipe dream, but it’s entirely plausible. Workers at all levels of design, production, and delivery know how to make the things society needs — they do it every day. They can run their workplaces collectively, cutting out the

The Red and the Black Seth Ackerman  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 9

Radically changing things would mean taking away the source of capitalists’ power: the private ownership of property.

29390

49

50

Working for the Weekend Chris Maisano  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 7/8

middle-men who own private property. Indeed, democratic control over our workplaces and the other institutions that shape our communities is the key to ending exploitation. That’s the socialist vision: abolishing private ownership of the things we all need and use — factories, banks, offices, natural resources, utilities, communication and transportation infrastructure — and replacing it with social ownership, thereby undercutting the power of elites to hoard wealth and power. And that’s also the ethical appeal of socialism: a world where people don’t try to control others for personal gain, but instead cooperate so that everyone can flourish. As for personal property, you can keep your Kenny Loggins records. In fact, in a society free from the destructive economic busts endemic to capitalism, with more employment security, and necessities removed from the sphere of the market, your record collection would be free from the danger zone because you wouldn’t have to pawn it for rent money. That’s socialism in a nutshell: less John Lennon, more Kenny Loggins.  ■

4836

Socialists want a world without private property, not personal property. You can keep your terrible music.

Doesn’t socialism always end up in dictatorship?

Joseph M. Schwartz

A generation of Americans has been taught that the Cold War was one fought between freedom and tyranny, with the outcome decisively won in favor of democratic capitalism. Socialism, of all stripes, was conflated with the crimes of the Soviet Union and doomed to the trash heap of bad ideas. Yet many socialists were consistent opponents of authoritarianism of both left and right varieties. Marx himself understood that only by the power of their democratic numbers could workers create a socialist society. To that end, The Communist Manifesto ends with a clarion call for workers to win the battle for democracy against aristocratic and reactionary forces. Legions of socialists followed this path, ardently defending political and civil rights, while also fighting to democratize control over economic and cultural life through expanded social rights and The ABCs of Socialism

53

workplace democracy. Despite the common assertion that “capitalism equals democracy,” capitalists themselves, absent the pressure from an organized working class, have never supported democratic reforms. While universal suffrage for white men came to the United States by the Jacksonian period, European socialists had to fight until the end of the nineteenth century against authoritarian capitalist regimes in Germany, France, Italy, and elsewhere to achieve the vote for working-class and poor men. Socialists gained popular support as the most consistent supporters of universal male suffrage — and eventually, women’s suffrage — as well as the legal right to form unions and other voluntary associations. Socialists and their allies in the labor movement have also long understood that people in a dire state of need cannot be free people. Thus, the socialist tradition is popularly identified outside the United States with winning the public provision of education, health care, child care, and old-age pensions and within the United States for backing many of these struggles. For many socialists, the support for democratic reforms was unconditional; but they also believed that the class power needed

While criticizing capitalism as anti-democratic, democratic socialists have consistently opposed authoritarian governments that claim to be socialist.

54

to restrain the power of capital had to be furthered so that working people could fully control their social and economic destiny. While criticizing capitalism as anti-democratic, democratic socialists consistently opposed authoritarian governments that claim to be socialist. Revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Victor Serge criticized early Soviet rule for banning opposition parties, eliminating experiments in workplace democracy, and failing to embrace political pluralism and civil liberties. If the state owns the means of production, the question remains: how democratic is the state? As Luxemburg wrote in her 1918 pamphlet on the Russian Revolution:

The Russian Revolution Rosa Luxemburg  •  1918

Doesn’t socialism always end up in dictatorship?

Luxemburg understood that the 1871 Paris Commune, the brief experiment in radical democracy that Marx and Engels referred to as a true working-class government, had multiple political parties in its municipal council, only one of which was affiliated with Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association. True to these values, socialists, dissident communists, and independent trade unionists led the democratic rebellions against Communist rule in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Poland in 1956, 1968, and 1980. Democratic socialists also led the brief, but extraordinary experiment of “socialism with a human face” under the The ABCs of Socialism

The Civil War in France Karl Marx  •  1871

Without general elections, without freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, without the free battle of opinions, life in every public institution withers away, becomes a caricature of itself, and bureaucracy rises as the only deciding factor.

55

Dubček government in Czechoslovakia in 1968. All these rebellions were crushed by Soviet tanks. The Soviet Union’s fall, however, hardly meant that democracy was won. Socialists reject the claim that capitalist democracy is fully democratic. In fact, the affluent have abandoned their commitment to even basic democracy when they felt threatened by worker movements. Marx’s analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire of French capitalist support for Louis Napoleon’s coup against the French Second Republic chillingly prefigures capital’s later support of fascism in the 1930s. In both cases, a declining petty bourgeoisie, a besieged middle class, and traditional agrarian elites gained the support of capitalists to thwart rising working-class militancy by overthrowing democratic governments. The authoritarian regimes of the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America likewise drew on corporate support of a similar nature. Much of the prestige of the postwar European left and today’s Latin American left stemmed from their being the most consistent opponents of fascism. The socialist and the anticolonial movements of the twentieth century understood that the revolutionary democratic goals of equality, liberty, and fraternity could not be realized if unequal economic power can be transformed into political power and if workers are dominated by capital. Socialists fight for economic democracy out of the radical democratic belief that “what touches all should be decided by all.” The capitalist argument that individual choice in the market equals freedom masks the reality that capitalism is an undemocratic system in which most people 56

spend much of their life being “bossed.” Corporations are forms of hierarchical dictatorships, as those who work in them have no voice in how they produce, what they produce, and how the profit they create is utilized. Radical democrats believe that binding authority (not just the law, but also the power to determine the division of labor in a firm) is only valid if every member of the institution affected by its practices has an equal voice in the making of those decisions. Democratizing a complex economy would likely take a variety of institutional forms, ranging from worker ownership and cooperatives, to state ownership of financial institutions and natural monopolies (such as telecommunications and energy) — as well as international regulation of labor and environmental standards. The overall structure of the economy would be determined through democratic politics and not by state bureaucrats. But the question remains: how to move beyond capitalist oligarchy to socialist democracy? By the late 1970s, many democratic socialists recognized that corporate profitability had been squeezed by the constraints the labor, feminist, environmental, and antiracist movements of the 1960s placed on capital. They understood that capitalists would retaliate through political mobilization, outsourcing, and capital strikes. Thus, across Europe, socialists pushed for reforms aimed at winning greater public control over investment. The Swedish labor movement embraced the Meidner Plan, a program which would have taxed corporate profits over a twenty-five-year period to create public ownership of major firms. A Socialist-Communist coalition that elected The ABCs of Socialism

The Great Reformer Kjell Östberg  •  Jacobin  •  9.10.2015

Doesn’t socialism always end up in dictatorship?

24895

57

58

24164

The Many Lives of François Mitterrand Jonah Birch  •  Jacobin  •  8.19.2015

François Mitterrand to the French presidency in 1981 nationalized 30 percent of French industry and radically enhanced collective bargaining rights. In response, French and Swedish capital invested abroad instead of at home, creating a recession that halted these promising moves toward democratic socialism. The policies of Thatcher and Reagan, which ushered in over thirty years of deunionization and cuts to the safety net, confirmed the Left’s prediction that either socialists would move beyond the welfare state to democratic control over capital or capitalist power would erode the gains of postwar social democracy. Today, socialists across the world face the daunting challenge of how to rebuild working-class political power strong enough to defeat the consensus of both conservatives and Third Way social democrats in favor of corporate-dictated austerity. But what of the many governments in the developing world that still call themselves socialist, particularly one-party states? In many ways, one-party Communist states shared more in common with past authoritarian capitalist “developmentalist” states — such as late nineteenth-century Prussia and Japan, and postwar South Korea and Taiwan — than with the vision of democratic socialism. These governments prioritized state-led industrialization over democratic rights, particularly those of an independent labor movement. Neither Marx nor classic European socialism anticipated that revolutionary socialist parties might most readily seize power in predominantly agrarian, autocratic societies. In part, these parties were based in a nascent working class radicalized

Doesn’t socialism always end up in dictatorship?

by the exploitation of foreign capital. But in China and Russia, the Communists also came to power because the aristocracy and warlords failed to defend the people against invasion — defeated peasant armies wanted peace and land. The Marxist tradition had little to say about how predominantly agrarian and postcolonial societies could develop in an equitable and democratic manner. What history does tell us is that trying to force peasants who had just been given private land by Communist revolutionaries back onto collective state farms results in brutal civil wars that sets back economic development for decades. Contemporary economic reforms in China, Vietnam, and Cuba favor a mixed-market economy with a significant role for foreign capital and private landowning peasants. But one-party elites instituting these experiments in economic pluralism have almost always repressed advocates of political pluralism, civil liberties, and labor rights. Despite continuous state harassment, the growing independent labor struggles in places like China and Vietnam may revive the working class’s role in promoting democracy. It is in those movements, not in autocratic governments, that socialists place their solidarity. The ABCs of Socialism

China in Revolt Eli Friedman  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 7/8

Socialists fight for economic democracy out of the radical belief that “what touches all should be decided by all.”

3715

59

Of course, there also exists a rich history of experiments in democratic socialism in the developing world, ranging from the 1970s Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende in Chile to the early years of Michael Manley’s government in Jamaica that same decade. The Latin American “pink tide” in Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Brazil today represents diverse experiments in democratic development — though their governing policies depend more on redistributing earnings from commodity exports than on restructuring economic power relations. But the United States government and global capitalist interests consistently work to undermine even these modest efforts at economic democracy. The cia and British intelligence overthrew the democratically-elected Mohammad Mosaddegh government in Iran in 1954 when it nationalized British oil. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank cut off credit to Chile and the cia actively aided Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military coup in that country. The United States likewise colluded with the imf to squeeze the Manley-era Jamaican economy. Capitalist hostility to even moderate reformist governments in the developing world knows no bounds. The US forcibly overthrew both the Jacobo Árbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 and the Juan Bosch presidency in the Dominican Republic in 1965 because they favored modest land reform. For students of history, the question should be not whether socialism necessarily leads to dictatorship, but whether a revived socialist movement can overcome the oligarchic and anti-democratic nature of capitalism.  ■ 60

Socialism is often conflated with authoritarianism. But historically, socialists have been among democracy’s staunchest advocates.

Is socialism a Western concept?

Nivedita Majumdar

Socialism is in the air. It returned to the United States with the 2008 economic crisis, which made capitalism’s exploitative nature clear for a new generation, and unleashed struggles to challenge austerity and staggering income inequality. Activists in a host of movements helped create the environment in which a presidential candidate could talk about socialism on a national stage. Though he might not be the most radical of figures, Bernie Sanders, who openly identifies as a socialist, is drawing tens of thousands to his campaign, upending everyone’s expectations. It’s no surprise, then, that the idea of socialism also faces heavy counterattack — and not only from the Right. Within the Left itself, there is suspicion of an ideal many view as single-mindedly focused on economic issues and distant from other everyday sufferings, especially those of black and brown people. Sanders’s specific The ABCs of Socialism

63

64

How Does the Subaltern Speak? Vivek Chibber  •  Jacobin  • Issue 10

7014

11608

After Rana Plaza Colin Long  •  Jacobin  •  6.6.2014

evocation of Scandinavian social democracy has elicited criticisms that he endorses a kind of “Nordic exceptionalism” that is hostile to diversity. Such attacks on even the tamest varieties of socialism are nourished, especially on college campuses, by theoretical positions that see Marxism and many of its descendants as hopelessly Eurocentric. The underlying assumption in these related lines of attack is that socialism, a supposedly Western (and white) ideology, while capable of addressing economic injustices, remains incapable of speaking to the lived experience of oppression and discrimination in the Global South, as well as oppressed groups elsewhere. Is there any validity in this criticism? The socialist ideal rests on the belief that working people all over the world suffer at the hands of capitalists and share a common interest in resisting exploitation. To call that a narrowly Western idea would be news to the more than 1,100 garment workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, who were killed in April 2013 when the Rana Plaza factory building in which they were working collapsed on them. The building had been declared a safety hazard, but their employers forced them in under threat of dismissal. Two years after the factory’s collapse, Human Rights Watch conducted a detailed study of industry practices in Bangladesh. It found severe industry-wide retaliation against labor organizing, which is the one effective safeguard against hazardous work conditions and dismal wages. In order to stop union activities, factory owners routinely led vicious campaigns of intimidation and retaliation against workers, most of them women. Workers attempting to

Is socialism a Western concept?

spearhead organizing drives not only lost their jobs, but were often blacklisted across the sector. On the other side of the globe, in April 2015, Walmart closed five of its American stores, laying off 2,200 workers with only a few hours’ notice. While the stated reason for the closures was “plumbing repairs,” it was a retaliatory action against workers trying to organize for a living wage and better work conditions. Walmart, where workers recently went on hunger strike to protest poverty wages, is the United States’ largest employer of blacks, Hispanics, and women. Is it Eurocentric to argue that Bangladeshi garment workers have as much at stake in fighting for their economic rights — for a decent livelihood and job security — as workers laid off at American Walmart stores? Certainly their Bangladeshi managers and factory owners don’t think so. They are no less worried about, and no less hostile to, the idea of workers organizing than are the managers of Walmart. Capitalists everywhere see workers as a source of profit. In a system driven solely by the profit motive, there is little incentive to address workers’ needs beyond the dictates of the market. And the laws of the market, whatever the claims of neoclassical economics, are not fair or impartial. The superior economic and political might of capital ensures that the market’s laws are always fixed in its favor. In both contexts, however, a socialist analysis points to another reality at work. Against all odds, workers invariably fight back. But it’s always an agonizing battle, with capital using every weapon in its arsenal to crush workers’ resistance. The The ABCs of Socialism

65

bosses’ crude methods include physical intimidation when they can get away with it, as in Bangladesh, and more polished gambits, like closing down entire stores, as in the United States. For labor, the result of the battle is always risky and unpredictable because capital retaliates against dissent at every step. But capital can never be fully at ease, either, because exploitation everywhere breeds resistance. Socialism is not Eurocentric because the logic of capital is universal — and so is resistance against it. Cultural specificities may shape some details of capital’s operation differently in the United States and in Bangladesh, in France and in Nicaragua, but they do not alter its fundamental prioritization of profits over people. This is why, for more than a hundred years, many of the most powerful and sweeping social movements in the Global South have been inspired by the socialist ideal. Whatever their differences, leaders as diverse as Mao Zedong in China, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Walter Rodney in Guyana, Chris Hani in South Africa, Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, M. N. Roy in India, and Che Guevara across Latin America saw socialism as a theory and practice no less relevant to their experience than it was for European trade unionists. And yes, these revolutionaries also faced political opponents who dismissed their cause as a theory of the West, unsuited to Eastern realities: the leaders of the religious right, landed classes, and other economic elites. On the fateful morning of the Rana Plaza collapse, workers were reluctant to go into the building. Large cracks had appeared on the walls of the factory and inspectors had declared the building a hazard. But 66

Is socialism a Western concept?

Why We’re Marxists Nivedita Majumdar  •  Jacobin  •  7.2.2014

The crime of capitalism is that it forces the vast majority of the population to remain preoccupied with basic concerns of nutrition, housing, health, and skill acquisition. It leaves little time for fostering the community and creativity that humans crave.

11866

management forced them to start working. A devastated mother later recalled that her eighteen-year-old daughter, who perished in the collapse, had been threatened with loss of pay for the entire month if she chose not to work that day. This is a specific kind

The ABCs of Socialism

67

of dehumanization, born of deprivation and powerlessness and familiar to workers in every part of the world, who are forced to choose between their livelihood and their safety. Socialism identifies the source of such dehumanization — private ownership and exploitation — and rejects it. Capitalism does not merely oppress workers on the factory floor. It creates an entire culture in which the logic of oppression and competition become common sense. It turns people against each other and their own humanity. Like Franz Kafka’s character in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa, people are alienated from their human selves, isolated from their fellow beings, and tortured by the loss of all that could be possible. There is nothing Eurocentric in rejecting the destructive logic of capital and fighting for a better world to replace it. It is the genuinely universal and humane choice.  ■

68

Socialism is not Eurocentric because the logic of capital is universal — and so is resistance against it.

What about racism? Don’t socialists only care about class?

For more than a year, the “Black Lives Matter” movement has gripped the United States. The movement’s central slogan is a simple, declarative recognition of black humanity in a society that is wracked by economic and social inequality that are disproportionately experienced by African Americans. The movement is relatively new, but the racism that spawned it is not. By every barometer in American society — health care, education, employment, poverty — African Americans are worse off. Elected officials from across the political spectrum often blame these disparities on an absence of “personal responsibility” or view them as a cultural phenomenon particular to African Americans. In reality, racial inequality has been largely produced by government policy and private institutions that not only impoverish African Americans but also demonize and criminalize them. The ABCs of Socialism

The Poverty of Culture Jonah Birch & Paul Heideman  •  Jacobin  •  9.6.2014

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

13783

71

Winning ordinary whites to an antiracist program is a key component in building a genuine,unified mass movement capable of challenging capital.

Yet racism is not simply a product of errant public policy or even the individual attitudes of racist white people — and understanding the roots of racism in American society is critical for eradicating it. Crafting better public policy and banning discriminatory behavior by individuals or institutions won’t do the job. And while there is a serious need for government action banning practices that harm entire groups of people, these strategies fail to grasp the scale and depth of racial inequality in the United States. To understand why the United States seems so resistant to racial equality, we have to look beyond the actions of elected officials or even those who prosper from racial discrimination in the private sector. We have to look at the way American society is organized under capitalism. Divide and Rule Capitalism is an economic system based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Because of the gross inequality it produces, capitalism relies on various political, social, and ideological tools to rationalize that inequality while simultaneously 72

What about racism?

dividing the majority, who have every interest in uniting to resist it. How does the 1 percent maintain its disproportionate control of the wealth and resources in American society? By a process of divide and rule. Racism is only one among many oppressions intended to serve this purpose. For example, American racism developed under the regime of slavery as a justification for the enslavement of Africans at a time when the world was celebrating the concepts of liberty, freedom, and self-determination. The dehumanization and subjection of black people had to be rationalized in this moment of new political possibilities. But the central objective was preserving the institution of slavery and the enormous riches that it produced. As Karl Marx recognized: Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Marx also identified the centrality of African slave labor to the genesis of capitalism when he wrote that “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins, The ABCs of Socialism

73

74

22959

How Race is Conjured Barbara J. Fields & Karen E. Fields  •  Jacobin  •  6.29.2015

signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” The labor needs of capital alone could explain how racism functioned under capitalism. The literal dehumanization of Africans for the sake of labor was used to justify their harsh treatment and their debased status in the United States. This dehumanization did not simply end when slavery was abolished; instead, the mark of inferiority branded onto black skin carried over into Emancipation and laid the basis for the second-class citizenship African Americans experienced for close to a hundred years after slavery. The debasement of blacks also made African Americans more vulnerable to economic coercion and manipulation — not just “anti-blackness.” Coercion and manipulation were rooted in the evolving economic demands of capital, but their impact rippled far beyond the economic realm. Black people were stripped of their right to vote, subjected to wanton violence, and locked into menial and poorly paid labor. This was the political economy of American racism. There was another consequence of racism and the marking of blacks. African Americans were so thoroughly banished from political, civil, and social life that it was virtually impossible for the vast majority of poor and working-class whites to even conceive of uniting with blacks to challenge the rule and authority of the ruling white clique. Marx recognized this basic division within the working class when he observed,  “In the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery

What about racism?

disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Marx grasped the modern dynamics of racism as the means by which workers who had common objective interests could also become mortal enemies because of subjective — but nevertheless real — racist and nationalist ideas. Looking at the tensions between Irish and English workers, Marx wrote: Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland ... This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it. For socialists in the United States, recognizing the centrality of racism in dividing the class that has the actual power to undo capitalism has typically meant that socialists have been heavily involved in campaigns and social movements to end racism. The ABCs of Socialism

75

But within the socialist tradition, many have also argued that because African Americans and most other nonwhites are disproportionately poor and working class, campaigns aimed at ending economic inequality alone would stop their oppression. This stance ignores how racism constitutes its own basis for oppression for nonwhite people. Ordinary blacks and other nonwhite minorities are oppressed not only because of their poverty but also because of their racial or ethnic identities. There is also no direct correlation between economic expansion or improved economic conditions and a decrease in racial inequality. In reality, racial discrimination often prevents African Americans and others from fully accessing the fruits of economic expansion. After all, the black insurgency of the 1960s coincided with the robust and thriving economy of the 1960s — black people were rebelling because they were locked out of American affluence. Looking at racism as only a byproduct of economic inequality ignores the ways that racism exists as an independent force that wreaks havoc in the lives of all African Americans. The struggle against racism regularly intersects with struggles for economic equality, but racism does not only express itself over economic questions. Antiracist struggles also take place in response to the social crises black communities experience, including struggles against racial profiling; police brutality; housing, health care, and educational inequality; and mass incarceration and other aspects of the “criminal justice” system. 76

23971

Class struggle changes people’s ideas and preconceptions and forges new bonds of solidarity. Working-class struggles have played a central role in winning white workers over to the fight against racism.

What about racism?

Taking Racism Seriously Jennifer Roesch  •  Jacobin  •  8.8.2015

These fights against racial inequality are critical, both to improving the lives of African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities in the here and now, and to demonstrating to ordinary white people The ABCs of Socialism

77

the destructive impact of racism in the lives of nonwhite people. Winning ordinary whites to an antiracist program is a key component in building a genuine, unified mass movement capable of challenging capital. Unity cannot be achieved by suggesting that black people should downplay the role of racism in our society so as not to alienate whites — while only focusing on the “more important” struggle against economic inequality. This is why multiracial groupings of socialists have always participated in struggles against racism. This was particularly true throughout the twentieth century, as African Americans became a more urban population in constant conflict and competition with native-born and immigrant whites over jobs, housing, and schools. Violent conflict between working-class blacks and whites underlined the extent to which racial division destroyed the bonds of solidarity necessary to collectively challenge employers, landlords, and elected officials. Socialists played key roles in campaigns against lynching and racism in the criminal justice system, like the Scottsboro Boys campaign in the 1930s, when nine African American youths were accused of raping

The struggle against racism regularly intersects with struggles for economic equality, but racism does not only express itself over economic concerns.

78

What about racism?

two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. The liberal National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) had been reluctant to take the case, but the Scottsboro trials became a priority for the Communist Party and its affiliated International Legal Defense. One part of the campaign involved touring the mothers of the boys around the country and then around the world to draw attention and support to their case. Ada Wright — mother to two of the boys — traveled to sixteen countries in six months in 1932 to tell her son’s story. Because she was traveling with known Communists, she was often barred from speaking. In Czechoslovakia she was accused of being a Communist and jailed for three days before being expelled from the country. Socialists were also involved in unionization drives among African Americans and were central to civil-rights campaigns in the North, South, and West for African Americans and other oppressed minorities. This engagement explains why many African Americans gravitated toward socialist politics over the course of their lives — socialists had always articulated a vision of society that could guarantee genuine black freedom. The ABCs of Socialism

The Black Belt Communists Robin D. G. Kelley  •  Jacobin  •  8.20.2015

Winning ordinary whites to an antiracist program is a key component in building a genuine, unified mass movement.

24300

79

We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy … “Who   owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?” These are questions that must be asked. As movements continued to radicalize, groups like the Black Panthers and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers followed in the tradition of Malcolm X when they linked Black oppression directly to capitalism. The Panthers and the League went further than Malcolm by attempting to build socialist organizations for the specific purpose of organizing working-class blacks to fight for a socialist future. Today the challenge for socialists is no different: being centrally involved in struggles against racism while also fighting for a world based on human need, not profit.  ■ 80

9653

Restoring King Thomas J. Sugrue  •  Jacobin  •  1.18.2015

By the late 1960s, even figures like Martin Luther King Jr were describing a kind of socialist vision of the future. In a 1966 presentation to a gathering of his organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King commented:

We actually think that the struggle against racism is central to undoing the ruling class’s power.

Aren’t socialism and feminism sometimes in conflict?

Socialism and feminism have a long, and at times fraught, relationship. Socialists are often accused of overemphasizing class — of placing the structural divide between those who must work for a wage to survive and those who own the means of production at the center of every analysis. Even worse they ignore or underplay how central other factors — like sexism, racism, or homophobia — are in shaping hierarchies of power. Or they admit the importance of these negative norms and practices, but argue that they can be rooted out only after we get rid of capitalism. Meanwhile, socialists accuse mainstream feminists of focusing too much on individual rights rather than collective struggle and ignoring the structural divides between women. They accuse mainstream feminists of aligning themselves with bourgeois political projects that diminish the agency of working women or pushing middle-class demands that ignore the needs and desires The ABCs of Socialism

Hillary Clinton’s Empowerment Kevin Young & Diana C. Sierra Becerra  •  Jacobin  •  3.9.2015

Nicole Aschoff

20512

83

of poor women, both in the global north and south. These are old debates that date back to the mid-nineteenth century and the First International, and revolve around deeply political questions of power and the contradictions of capitalist society. Muddying the waters further is how the politics of feminism is complicated by the historical nature of capitalism — the way sexism is integrated into both processes of profit making and the reproduction of the capitalist system as a whole is dynamic. This dynamism is very apparent today when a female presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, is the top choice among US millionaires. But the divide between socialism and feminism is ultimately an unnecessary one. Why Socialists Should Be Feminists The oppression of women, both in US society and globally, is multi-dimensional — gender divides in the political, economic, and social spheres underscore why, to free ourselves from the tyranny of capital, socialists must also be feminists. The possibility of a woman finally becoming US president highlights the stark lack of female leadership, both in the US and around the world. Despite powerful women like Angela Merkel, Christine LeGarde, Janet Yellen, and Dilma Rousseff, the gender balance in politics and the corporate world remains highly skewed. Only 4 percent of ceos at Fortune 500 firms are women and most corporate boards have few if any female members. Globally, 90 percent of heads of state are men, and at the 2015 World Economic 84

Forum only 17 percent of the 2,500 representatives present were women, while 2013 marked the first time women held twenty seats in the US Senate. Unlike many countries, women in the United States have, roughly speaking, equal rights and legal protection, as well as access to education, nutrition, and health care as men. But gender divides are apparent across society. Women outperform men in higher education but they don’t achieve comparable levels of success or wealth and remain stereotyped and under-represented in the popular media. Attacks on women’s reproductive rights continue unabated and after a long, steady decline through the 1990s, rates of violence against women haven’t budged since 2005. At the same time, decisions about balancing home life and work life, in the face of ever-increasing housing and childcare costs, are as difficult as ever. In the fifty years since the passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act women have entered the workforce en masse; today 60 percent of women work outside the home. Single and married mothers are even more likely to work, including 57 percent of mothers with children under the age of one.

Abortion Without Apology Jenny Brown & Erin Mahoney  •  Jacobin  •  12.31.2015

Aren’t socialism and feminism sometimes in conflict?

27772

Capital feeds on existing norms of sexism, compounding the exploitative nature of wage work.

The ABCs of Socialism

85

But women who work full time still earn only 81 percent what men do — a number inflated by faster declines in men’s wages (aside from the college educated) in recent years. Pay gaps are matched by a gendered division of labor. The retail, service, and food sectors — the center of new job growth — are dominated by women, and the feminization of “care” work is even more pronounced. Despite recent gains, like the extension of the Fair Labor Standards Act to domestic workers, care work is still seen as women’s work and undervalued. Disproportionate numbers of caring jobs are low-paying, contingent gigs in which humiliation, harassment, assault, and wage theft are common. In addition to these clear differences between the experiences of men and women in the us there are more insidious, long-range effects of sexism. Feminists like bell hooks argue that sexism and racism pervade all corners of society and that dominant narratives of power glorify white, heteronormative visions of life. From birth, boys and girls are treated differently and gender stereotypes introduced in the home, school, and everyday life are perpetuated throughout women’s lives, shaping their identities and life choices. Sexism also plays a less obvious, but critical, role in profit-making. From the beginning, capitalism has relied on unpaid labor outside the labor market (mainly in the home) that provides the essential ingredient for capital accumulation: workers — who must be created, clothed, fed, socialized, and loved. This unpaid labor is highly gendered. While more men take part in household 86

Aren’t socialism and feminism sometimes in conflict?

Caring in the City Johanna Brenner  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 15/16

Even at their height, Nordic welfare states never came close to truly socializing the labor of care — especially when we think beyond childrearing to the many kinds of care that people need over their lifetimes.

14168

chores and child-rearing than in the past, social reproduction still falls primarily on women who are expected to shoulder the heaviest burden of household tasks. Most women also perform paid labor outside the

The ABCs of Socialism

87

home turning their work in the home into a “second shift.” In this way, women are doubly oppressed — exploited in the workplace and unrecognized as workers in the social reproduction of labor.

These persistent, cross-class gender divides — in the political, economic, and social spheres — fuel the dominant feminist viewpoint that sexism is a thing apart from capitalism, something that must be tackled separately. Throughout numerous waves of feminist struggle, activists have pursued a variety of strategies for combating sexism and gender divides. Today, mainstream feminists gravitate toward a focus on putting women in power — both in the political and economic sphere — as a way to solve the range of problems women face, such as wage inequality, violence, work-life balance, and sexist socialization. Prominent spokeswomen like Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and many others advocate this “take-power” feminist strategy. Sandberg — one of the most influential proponents of this strategy — argues that women need to stop being afraid and start “disrupting the status quo.” If they do, she believes this generation can close the leadership gap and in doing so make the world a better place for all women. The thrust of the take-power argument is that if women were in power they, unlike men, would take care to implement policies that benefit women and that cross-class gender divides in economic, political, and cultural spheres will only be eliminated if 88

She Can’t Sleep No More Sarah Leonard  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 9

Why Feminists Should Be Socialists

5602

Aren’t socialism and feminism sometimes in conflict?

women hold an equal number of leadership positions to men. The emphasis on individual advancement as the path to achieving the goals of feminism is not new, and has been critiqued by numerous feminists including Charlotte Bunch and Susan Faludi who question the notion of sisterly solidarity as a remedy for deep-seated gender divides. As Faludi says, “You can’t change the world for women by simply inserting female faces at the top of an unchanged system of social and economic power.” Socialist-feminists like Johanna Brenner also point to how mainstream feminism glosses over deep tensions among women: We can generously characterize as ambivalent the relationships between working-class women/poor women and the middle-class professional women whose jobs it is to uplift and regulate those who come to be defined as problematic — the poor, the unhealthy, the culturally unfit, the sexually deviant, the ill-educated. These class tensions bleed into feminist politics, as middle-class feminist advocates claim to represent working-class women. So while it is certainly necessary to recognize how gendered contemporary society remains, it is also necessary to be clear-eyed about how to overcome these divides and, equally important, to recognize the limitations of a feminism that doesn’t challenge capitalism. Capital feeds on existing norms of sexism, compounding the exploitative nature of wage work. When women’s ambitions and desires are silenced or under-valued, they are easier to take advantage of. Sexism is The ABCs of Socialism

89

To free ourselves from the tyranny of capital, socialists must also be feminists.

part of the company toolkit, enabling firms to pay women less — particularly women of color — and otherwise discriminate against them. But even if we root out sexism, the inherent contradictions of capitalism will persist. It is important and necessary that women step into positions of power, but this won’t change the fundamental divide between workers and owners — between women at the top and women at the bottom. It won’t change the fact that most women find themselves in precarious, low-wage jobs that present a far greater barrier to advancement and a comfortable life than sexism in the economic or political sphere. It won’t change the power of the profit motive and the compulsion of companies to give workers as little as economic, social, and cultural norms will allow. Of course, society is not reducible to the wage relation and gender divides are real and persistent. Taking class seriously means anchoring the oppression of women within the material conditions in which they live and work while recognizing the role of sexism in shaping both women’s work-life and their home life. The feminist movement — both its “social-welfare” incarnation and its radical contemporary — has made significant gains. The challenge now is two-fold: to defend these hard-won victories and 90

Aren’t socialism and feminism sometimes in conflict?

make it possible for all women to actually enjoy them, and to push forward with new, concrete demands that address the complex relationship between sexism and profit-making. There is no simple answer to how to accomplish these twin goals. In the past, women have made the biggest gains by fighting for both women’s rights and workers’ rights simultaneously — linking the fight against sexism to the fight against capital. As Eileen Boris and Anelise Orleck argue, during the 1970s and ’80s “trade union feminists helped launch a revitalized women’s movement that sparked new demands for women’s rights at home, on the job, and within unions.” Airline stewardesses, garment workers, clericals, and domestic workers challenged the male-dominated trade union movement (a woman didn’t sit on the afl-cio executive board until 1980) and in the process forged a new, more expansive feminism. Trade union women created a new field of possibility by demanding not only higher wages and equal opportunity but also childcare, flexible work schedules, pregnancy leave, and other gains usually overlooked or undervalued by their union brothers. This is the direction that both socialists and feminists should be orienting themselves — toward struggles and demands that challenge both the drives of capital and the ingrained norms of sexism that are so deeply rooted under capitalism. Struggles and demands that achieve this are concrete and are currently being fought for. For example, the struggle for single-payer health care — which would provide health care as a right to every The ABCs of Socialism

91

person from cradle to grave regardless of their ability to pay — is a demand that undermines both sexism and the power of capital to control and repress worker agency. There are many other concrete short-term demands that blend the goals of feminism and socialism as well, including free higher education, free childcare, and a universal basic income combined with a robust social safety net. These reforms would lay the groundwork for more radical goals that would go far in rooting out sexism, exploitation, and the commodification of social life. For example, projects to increase collective, democratic control over institutions central to our home, school, and work lives — schools, banks, workplaces, city governments, and state and local agencies — would give all women and men more power, autonomy, and the possibility for a better life. This anticapitalist strategy is one that contains the possibility for the radical change that women need. Ultimately the goals of radical feminism and socialism are the same — justice and equality for all people, not simply equal opportunity for women or equal participation by women in an unjust system.  ■

92

Ultimately the goals of a radical feminism and socialism are the same — justice and equality for all people.

Wouldn’t a more democratic world just mean a bigger environmental crisis?

Capitalism is wreaking havoc on the world we live in. Climate change threatens to alter our planet beyond recognition, drowning coastal settlements, intensifying droughts and heat waves, and strengthening extreme weather. The most harmful effects, of course, are falling on the world’s poorest people. Overfishing has pushed fisheries to the point of collapse; fresh water supplies are scarce in regions that are home to half the world’s population; fertilizer-intensive factory farming has exhausted agricultural land of nutrients; forests are being leveled at staggering rates to make way for cash crops and cattle ranches; extinction rates compare to those of prehistoric meteorinduced apocalypses. These aren’t issues that can be fixed by changing a lightbulb. Human activity has transformed the entire planet in ways that are now threatening the way we inhabit it — some of us far more than others. But if The ABCs of Socialism

The Anthropocene Myth Andreas Malm  •  Jacobin  •  3.30.2015

Alyssa Battistoni

20875

95

We need to value the work of ecological production — to recognize that the activity of ecosystems keeps the earth viable for human life, and care for them accordingly.

you point out that it’s not humanity in the abstract but capitalism that we should hold responsible, you’ll hear a familiar retort: socialism is bad for the environment too! Production in the Soviet Union also ran on fossil fuels, degraded agricultural land, polluted rivers, and deforested vast expanses. It’s true that the USSR’s environmental record doesn’t inspire much confidence. But that doesn’t mean that capitalism can solve our environmental problems, as bright-green entrepreneurs declare, or that modern industrial society must be abandoned altogether, as some deep greens would have it. Capitalism can certainly survive worsening environmental conditions, at least for a while — but it will survive under conditions of increasing eco-apartheid, with safety and comfort for the wealthy and growing scarcity for the rest. Yet the twentieth-century socialist dream of maximizing production in the pursuit of abundance and equality seems increasingly untenable. Marxists held that communism would arise amid postcapitalist conditions of superabundance: once the capitalist engines were roaring, they could be seized and put to the benefit 96

Is socialism bad for the environment?

of all. But those engines can’t run on fossil fuels any more, and contemporary consumer capitalism isn’t the abundance we had in mind. We need not only to seize the means of production, but to transform them. We also need a different vision of the future than has been put forth by the Left more recently. Environmental leftism of late has tended towards an anarchist bent that’s distrustful of large-scale production and concentrated power, whether private or public. This shouldn’t be surprising — because environmental problems are so place-specific, they often prompt small-scale local solutions. But climate change and other environmental crises arising from global systems of production and consumption are systemic issues of political economy; addressing them will require more than just pockets of alternative practice. And environmental problems don’t respect political borders: ecological interdependence is another reminder that sustainability will come only through global solidarity. To what future should twenty-firstcentury socialism aspire? How can we achieve a just society without relying on fossil fuels or exacerbating other forms of environmental destruction? In figuring out an answer, socialists should look to socialist-feminist traditions concerned with the work that makes life livable. Socialist-feminists have long called attention to the labor of social reproduction — the activities necessary to replenish wage laborers both individually and across generations, such as education, childcare, housework, and food preparation. Struggles over social reproduction have focused The ABCs of Socialism

97

98

Seize the Hamptons Daniel Aldana Cohen  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 15/16

on the demands and possibilities of life outside the factory, and they have much to teach us about organizing new ways of living. We also need to value the work of ecological reproduction — to recognize that the activity of ecosystems keeps the earth viable for human life, and care for them accordingly. While some socialists aspire to a superabundance of everything for everyone, environmentalists tend to point to overconsumption as a primary culprit of environmental degradation. But not all consumption is equivalent. Capitalism relies on cheap inputs in the form of labor and nature to make its cheap goods. As a result, the system consistently drives down both environmental and labor costs and standards. Inexpensive goods aren’t necessarily bad, but they shouldn’t come at the cost of working people and ecosystems. The goal of a socialist society is not to clamp down on popular consumption, but to create a society that emphasizes quality of life over quantity of things. We need to find ways to live luxuriously but also lightly, aesthetically rather than ascetically. Instead of an endless cycle of working and shopping, life in a low-carbon socialist future would be oriented around activities that make life beautiful and fulfilling but require less intensive resource consumption: reading books, teaching, learning, making music, seeing shows, dancing, playing sports, going to the park, hiking, spending time with one another. Robust provision of public goods makes it possible to enjoy communal luxuries while decreasing wasteful forms of private consumption. That means public housing that’s affordable for all; free, extensive

14170

Is socialism bad for the environment?

The goal of a socialist society is not to clamp down on popular consumption, but to create a society that emphasizes quality of life over quantity of things.

transportation systems both within and between cities so that people can get around without owning a car; spacious parks and gardens that offer respite from daily life; support for arts and culture of a variety of forms; and plentiful spaces for public educational and recreational use, like libraries, basketball courts, and theaters. Cities are often touted as a key part of green futures on account of their energy-efficient density. But green cities require more than just urban planning and tall buildings. Socialism must reclaim the city as a space for struggle and solidarity in pursuit of needs and wants — to provide public resources as a means to emancipation and flourishing, and to insist on public places as spaces of beauty and pleasure. Capitalists promise that technology will solve environmental problems. Technological solutions aren’t a panacea, but we can’t surrender technology to venture capitalists either: utopian socialist projects have long imagined a better world built from the combined abilities of humans, nature, and technology. And a host of current technologies, from clean energy sources to biotechnologies, promise to be part of a more sustainable future. But as long as they’re privately controlled, produced The ABCs of Socialism

99

100

26111

The Green Struggle Brent Ryan Bellamy & David Thomas  •  Jacobin  •  10.27.2015

only when profitable, and accessible only to those who can pay, their potential will be exploited only as it serves capitalists. A socialist society would support research into problems whose solutions aren’t profitable and ensure that resulting technologies are put to use for public benefit. Energy in particular is of central importance — energy use accounts for half of all carbon emissions and underpins modern life at every point. Renewable energy technologies, and solar power in particular, promise to be bountiful sources of clean energy. But while solar power is often touted as inherently small-scale and democratic, private companies are also assembling giant solar farms, positioning themselves as the conduit for a clean energy future. Meanwhile, deregulation and privatization of electric utilities in the neoliberal era has crippled the public’s ability to build the new interconnected electric infrastructure that would make a major clean-energy transition possible. A socialist society could choose which energy sources to use and how quickly a transition should occur on the basis of knowledge about environmental and health benefits and social needs, rather than profit margins. We could produce clean energy on a large scale and build the infrastructure necessary to make it available to and affordable for all. At the same time, new technologies don’t in themselves constitute progress, tech companies’ self-serving claims aside. New medical electronics, for example, don’t always translate into better care; iPads don’t translate into better education — in fact, the opposite is too often the case. A socialist society would make decisions about producing and implementing

Is socialism bad for the environment?

new technologies based on democratically chosen aims, rather than producing and consuming wastefully in order to keep various industries profitable. We could make sure everyone had access to clean, cheap electricity, for instance, before devoting resources to making electronic toys for the wealthy. There will still be extractive activities, large-scale power plants, and industrial factories in a sustainable socialism. Some of these will be unsightly; some of them will disturb local ecosystems. But instead of dumping the harms of modern production on the people with the least power to resist them — such as workers, communities of color, and indigenous communities — we will make conscious decisions about what harms we’ll accept and where and how they materialize, prioritizing the perspectives and needs of those who have long suffered from them. We could treat working landscapes as more than wastelands and recognize that the presence of machinery and industry doesn’t have to mean devastation. We could pay the costs of minimizing environmental damage rather than cutting corners to beat the competition. Capitalism began by enclosing public and common resources for private benefit and dispossessing their previous users. Collective ownership of the means of production should include common ownership of the land, oceans, and atmosphere. That would mean not only sharing in the resources that those spaces generate, but deciding together how they should be used. A socialist society could use scientific knowledge about ecological capacity to manage and regulate use of those spaces rather than ceding to industry whims: we’d The ABCs of Socialism

101

102

9538

Alive in the Sunshine Alyssa Battistoni  •  Jacobin  •  Issue 13

listen to the 98 percent of scientists who say that anthropogenic climate change is happening, for example, rather than the lies of fossil-fuel lobbyists. Under socialism, we would make decisions about resource use democratically, with regard to human needs and values rather than maximizing profit. An ecologically sustainable socialism isn’t about preserving an idealized concept of pristine, untouched nature. It’s about choosing the world we make and live in, and about recognizing that we share that world with species other than humans. A world that’s livable is a world where everyone can have a good life instead of just scrambling to make a living. That world will need forests as well as factories, wilderness refuges as well as cities. We’ll seek to provide people with good work, but we’ll also work less; we’ll think about what work really needs to be done instead of creating jobs just to keep people employed. We’ll choose to keep some spaces free of obvious human use, and to protect spaces for wildlife while also making it possible for people to escape city life to spend time in restored ecosystems. We’ll aim to produce enough for everyone to live lives that are rich and full, rather than hoping for a long shot at accumulating private riches. With our needs provided for, we can realize our human potential in the context of leisurely social relationships to other humans and other species, with enough for everyone and time for what we will.  ■

Under socialism, we would make decisions about resource use democratically, with regard to human needs and values rather than maximizing profit.

Are socialists pacifists? Aren’t some wars justified?

Jonah Birch

In June 1918, Eugene Debs gave a speech that would land him in prison. Speaking in Canton, Ohio, the Socialist Party leader denounced President Woodrow Wilson and the Great War he had led the United States into. For Debs, the mass slaughter that had raged across Europe for four bloody years was a conflict waged in the interests of capitalists, but fought by workers. In each country it was the rich who had declared war and stood to profit from it; but it was the poor who were sent to fight and die by the millions. This, Debs told his audience, was how it had always been, as long as armies had been sent to battle one another in the name of king or country. “Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder,” he said. “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, The ABCs of Socialism

105

while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.” Debs’s message to workers was a simple one: their enemy was not the people of Germany, the working-class soldiers they were being shipped off to murder; it was the rulers, on both sides, who ordered the troops into battle. It was the capitalists and their representatives in the American and German governments, whose wealth and power gave them control over the fates of millions. Debs’s speech was too much for authorities in the United States — they arrested him under a new law restricting free speech, the 1917 Espionage Act, and sentenced him to ten years in jail. Remarkably, in the 1920 election, Debs ran for president on the Socialist ticket while sitting in an Atlanta federal penitentiary, and still managed to win almost a million votes. Making the World Safe for Capitalism In the example of Debs, we can see the core ideas that have underpinned the socialist movement’s approach to the question of war. Socialists have always seen capitalism’s propensity for wars of conquest and plunder as the ultimate expression of the system’s brutality. In the organization of state violence on an unprecedented scale, we see capitalism’s tendency to subordinate human need to the logic of profit and power. In the gap between the promise of democratic equality and the reality of class oppression that war expresses, we see the fundamental injustice that defines our social order. Under capitalism, exploitation occurs mostly through the market. It is the 106

The ABCs of Socialism

30196

26507

Abolish the Military Greg Shupak  •  Jacobin  •  11.11.2015

ostensibly non-coercive contractual relationship between workers and employers that masks deeper underlying class inequalities. But the war-making power of the capitalist state is still essential for the healthy functioning of the system. Capitalists in countries like the United States still rely on their own government’s military, both to enforce the “rules of the game” in the global economy and to help them compete more effectively against other ruling classes. Against this state of affairs, socialists support the organization of mass movements against the wars waged by our government. We participate in the struggle against restrictions on free speech and other democratic rights which inevitably accompany these wars. Against calls for  “national unity,” we fight for international solidarity and stronger class organization to fight for workers’ interests. In the longer run, we aim to translate these movements into a broader struggle for a radical transformation of society along democratic lines. Nowhere is this approach more important than in the United States — the most powerful capitalist country in the world. Today, the US spends more on its military than the next seven highest-spending countries combined. Our government has roughly eight hundred foreign military bases. American soldiers or allied troops are present in every region of the globe. Over the past century and a half, the American state has waged brutal wars on behalf of a growing empire, from the 1898 Spanish-American War to the recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It has intervened again and again in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to protect the interests

Students Into Soldiers Rory Fanning  •  Jacobin  •  4.7.2016

Are socialists pacifists? Aren’t some wars justified?

107

of business and stamp out movements that might threaten its control over key resources or undermine the global capitalist system’s stability. Often these adventures were depicted as being necessary to bring freedom and democracy to oppressed countries, or to protect American citizens from danger. The historical record, however, tells a different story. Even at the time of the 1898 SpanishAmerican War, considered by many to have been the dawn of modern American imperialism, the US government was invading Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the name of freeing their peoples from the yoke of Spanish colonialism. When, after victory was secured, Washington decided to make those three territories American protectorates (or in the case of Puerto Rico, an outright colony), it issued assurances that it had only the most benevolent intentions. And when the residents of those countries took these promises of freedom and democracy too literally, the United States decided it had no choice but to crush the popular independence struggles that emerged. In the Philippines, a nationalist insurrection that erupted in 1899 was put down at the cost of several hundred thousand Filipino lives. In every war between then and now the pattern has been the same. The US government entered World War i in 1917 (after Wilson won the 1916 election on the basis of his antiwar pledges) to “make the world safe for democracy,” while sending Marines all over Latin America in defense of capital’s economic and political interests. It fought World War ii to “free the world of tyranny,” but spent the postwar years fixing elections 108

in Italy, sponsoring a vicious civil war in Greece, and propping up the shah of Iran. It sent millions to their graves in Korea and Southeast Asia to “save” people there from Communism, while installing brutal dictatorships in both South Vietnam and South Korea. Meanwhile, US policy-makers covertly organized the overthrow of popular and democratic governments all over the globe — from Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran to Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Salvador Allende in Chile. To justify these campaigns, American officials have often resorted to vicious racism. General William Westmoreland once justified the brutality of the forces he led in Vietnam by saying that “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner ... We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.” At every turn, the American government has shown its commitment to democracy and freedom abroad to be as shallow as its commitment to equality at home. Again and again, it has proven that its fear of democratic control over the world’s resources ran deeper than its pro-democratic rhetoric. As Henry Kissinger, who served as a foreign-policy advisor to three presidents, said of the efforts by the Nixon administration to topple Chile’s elected socialist government, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” The same went for 1980s attempts to undermine leftist governments in tiny Nicaragua and even tinier Grenada. More recently, this pattern has been repeated in the Middle East — now the central battleground for the US and its The ABCs of Socialism

Nixon and the Cambodian Genocide Brett S. Morris  •  Jacobin  •  4.27.2015

Are socialists pacifists? Aren’t some wars justified?

21447

109

imperial competitors, because of its role as the center of global oil production. If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were initially justified as necessary to defend American lives, destroy Al Qaeda, and eradicate terrorism, they accomplished none of those aims. Nor have they resulted in democratic governments in either country. On the contrary, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in these wars have only destabilized the region and intensified sectarian divisions. Rather than supporting democratic movements, the United States has backed dictatorial regimes in Egypt and Bahrain, and helped strengthen the most vicious and reactionary monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The United States has also allowed Israel to escalate its daily violence (with semi-regular bouts of mass killings in Gaza), occupation, and settlement expansion at the expense of Palestinians. And it has watched as the contending sides in the Syrian civil war have overseen a slaughter that has drowned the Syrian struggle for democracy in the blood of hundreds of thousands of citizens. Given the scope and scale of American imperial violence, it’s crucial that socialists in the United States oppose their government’s military interventions. Such a stance is necessary for any genuine working-class solidarity. Every time the US government blows up an Afghan wedding party or helps protect a death squad in Iraq; every time it sends someone to rot in a prison in Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay; every time it allows the cia to torture a prisoner; it makes class solidarity across borders less likely. Why should workers in other countries ally themselves with those in the United 110

Are socialists pacifists? Aren’t some wars justified?

States, in whose name they are bombed and occupied? To the extent that Americans buy into the nationalism that inevitably goes along with their government’s machinations abroad, they make the emergence of a class-based movement against oppression and exploitation impossible. Meanwhile, the position of American workers only deteriorates further. When hundreds of billions of dollars are spent attacking countries around the globe, it isn’t available for social welfare programs that could help those at home. The waste of blood and resources, the racism, and the reactionary upsurges that are the handmaidens of wars abroad all rebound to the detriment of workers in the US. At a time when millions of Americans are suffering from unemployment and poverty, the more than $2 trillion spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq seems increasingly obscene. All this means that the American labor movement has a material incentive to oppose its own government’s drive to war. It is for this reason that socialists think an international working-class movement against war and imperialism is not only necessary, but also possible. The Enemy at Home However, if socialists in a country like the United States are opposed to the wars fought by their governments, that does not mean they are pacifists — that is, that they oppose all wars or have a principled stance against any kind of violence. The question is who is waging the war and on behalf of what interests or policies. The ABCs of Socialism

111

As the nineteenth-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” Clausewitz meant that to understand the character of a given war, you had to understand who was fighting it and for what purpose. Of course, Clausewitz, a Prussian general in the Napoleonic Wars, was hardly a left-wing radical, but his basic point is an important one for socialists to understand. The socialist movement wants to eradicate war because it is brutal and irrational — a waste of human life and social resources that produces enormous devastation. But in a world filled with exploitation and oppression, one has to differentiate between the violence of those fighting to maintain injustice, and those fighting against injustice. One cannot, for example, conflate the violence of South African apartheid with that of the armed elements of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. The same goes for the violence of the American military during the Vietnam War — a war that eventually killed as many as 3.5 million people — and that of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, which fought to free Vietnam from French and American domination. For the socialist movement, Clausewitz’s dictum points to the need to assess any war on the basis of the interests it serves. It’s no coincidence that socialists like Marx and Engels supported the Union in the Civil War, recognizing that despite Lincoln’s stated intention to reunite the country without doing away with slavery, a war against the Confederacy would necessarily become a war against the planter class. In fact, as Lincoln — who in the 1840s opposed 112

Are socialists pacifists? Aren’t some wars justified?

10835

A conservative estimate of civilian deaths arising from the war is two million in South Vietnam alone, from a population of nineteen million. An analogous civilian casualty rate in the United States today would be nearly thirty-three million.

the Mexican-American War because he saw it as an effort to expand slavery to new territories — came to recognize, the North could only succeed by mobilizing slaves in a battle for their own freedom.

The Burden of Atrocity Penny Lewis  • Jacobin • 4.29.2014

The ABCs of Socialism

113

None of this is to suggest that socialists have a purely instrumental approach to violence — that we think, as is so often claimed, that “the ends justify of the means.” In our efforts to achieve the kind of change we seek, violence can only undermine our cause over the long term; we can never hope to match the capacity for violence of the capitalist state, and our movement will only be weakened insofar as the struggle for socialism is transformed from a social and political conflict into a military one. Nor are we necessarily supportive of governments just because they happen to be in conflict with our own: we do not excuse the imperial violence of, for instance, Russia and China simply because they are occasionally at loggerheads with our own rulers. More fundamentally, it is important to be clear that our support for groups fighting against their oppression, at the hands of the US government or anyone else, does not mean that we’re always uncritical of these forces. One need only look at the growing levels of inequality and the increasing penetration of global capitalism in South Africa since the fall of apartheid, or in Vietnam since its liberation, to see that even victorious struggles need not produce a truly just outcome. Indeed, while expressing solidarity with movements challenging oppression, socialists must be willing to criticize those waging these struggles, whenever necessary — whether that criticism is made on political, strategic, or even moral grounds. But neither do we treat all sides in a particular conflict as if they were the same. Above all, we oppose our own government’s role in propagating wars, or expanding its military and political influence, at the 114

Are socialists pacifists? Aren’t some wars justified?

expense of the working classes of the world. As the German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht put it in a speech during World War i, we understand that “the main enemy is at home.” On that basis, we hope to forge an internationalist movement that can not only challenge a particular imperial intervention, but can come to pose a threat to the very foundations of a system that breeds war and mass violence on a scale unprecedented in history.

Today, the Left is far too weak to accomplish that goal. In the United States, the labor movement lacks the capacity for sustained activity against war. But what the example of Eugene Debs shows us is that there is a long history of radical opposition to imperialism from which we can draw hope and inspiration. That tradition of left-wing antiimperialism lived on after Debs himself died. If it lost steam during the Cold War years of McCarthyite repression after World War ii, it was revived during the 1960s and 1970s. Figures such as Martin Luther King Jr became increasingly vocal critics of the Vietnam War. Although he is often depicted as an anodyne moralist, a precursor to multicultural liberalism, King was actually a visionary whose politics became increasing radical in tandem with the movement he led. Nothing expressed that growing radicalism better than his decision to publicly oppose the Vietnam War — a move which even his closest advisors recommended against because of its potential political consequences. The ABCs of Socialism

Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost Joe Allen  •  Haymarket Books  •  2007

Beyond Imperialism

115

Ignoring their counsel, on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, King delivered the most controversial speech of his career. Speaking at New York’s Riverside Church, he came out against the Vietnam War and called on the Johnson administration to halt its unprecedented bombing campaign and initiate a withdrawal of the half-million US troops in Southeast Asia. Decrying the “madness” of the Democratic administration’s policy, King focused on the incredible brutality that ordinary people in Vietnam faced at the hands of the American military. “They must see Americans as strange liberators,” he concluded, when that supposed liberation involved propping up corrupt, undemocratic governments, destroying entire villages, defoliating the countryside with napalm and Agent Orange, and killing women, children, and the elderly. And what of the US soldiers, overwhelmingly working-class kids drawn from poverty-stricken rural communities and segregated urban ghettoes? Noting the disproportionate number of African Americans who had been sent to kill and die in the swamps of Vietnam, King castigated the administration for “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” King pointed out that the hopes for a real effort to combat poverty in the US that had been inspired by Johnson’s Great Society program had been destroyed by the escalation in Vietnam. A genuine campaign to eradicate poverty at home was impossible, 116

Are socialists pacifists? Aren’t some wars justified?

In a world filled with exploitation and oppression, one has to differentiate between the violence of those fighting to maintain injustice, and those fighting against injustice.

he had concluded, “so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.” Given all this, King said that he could no longer keep silent, despite the strong pressure from his supposed allies in the Johnson administration to avoid public criticism of the government’s Vietnam policy. Comparing the incredible scale of the violence in Vietnam to the relatively minor destruction produced by a series of riots that had broken out in many of America’s big cities — which had caused much hand-wringing in the press over the threat posed by “black extremists” — King described his realization “that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” A few days later, he marched in a mass protest against the war in New York’s Central Park. King’s speech, known to posterity as “Beyond Vietnam,” earned him the ire The ABCs of Socialism

117

118

19306

The Evolution of Dr. King Lee Sustar  •  Jacobin  •  1.18.2015

of even previously sympathetic figures in the liberal establishment. He was disinvited from a planned visit with Johnson at the White House. One of the president’s advisors wrote privately that King had “thrown in his lot with the commies.” Meanwhile, he was attacked in editorials that appeared the next day in 168 major newspapers. The  New York Times wrote that his denunciation of the war was “wasteful and self-defeating.” The Washington Post did them one better, saying of King, “he has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people.” What King came to understand was that racism and inequality at home, and war abroad, were interlinked. This recognition put him at odds with his erstwhile liberal supporters, whose willingness to challenge the status quo ended — as it so often has for the liberal establishment — when America’s position as the world’s strongest imperial power came into question. Yet in confronting these questions, and challenging his former friends, King was taking on a set of issues any mass social movement that makes serious advances in the United States will eventually have to face: one can’t talk about social change at home while ignoring the carnage generated by American foreign policy. For the US left, and especially any future socialist movement here, that’s a lesson worth learning.  ■

Socialists want to eradicate war because it is brutal and irrational. But we think there’s a difference between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressors.

Why do socialists talk so much about workers?

Vivek Chibber

Most people know that socialists place the working class at the center of their political vision. But why exactly? When I put this question to students or even to activists, I get a range of answers, but the most common response is a moral one — socialists think that workers suffer the most under capitalism, making their plight the most important issue to focus on. Now it is true, of course, that workers face all sorts of indignities and material deprivation, and any movement for social justice has to take this as a central issue. But if this is all there is to it, if this is the only reason we should focus on class, the argument falls apart pretty easily. After all, there are lots of groups who suffer indignities and injustices — racial minorities, women, the disabled. Why single out workers? Why not just say that every marginal and oppressed group ought to be at the heart of socialist strategy? Yet there is more to the focus on class than just the moral argument. The reason The ABCs of Socialism

121

socialists believe that class organizing has to be at the center of a viable political strategy also has to do with two other practical factors: a diagnosis of what the sources of injustice are in modern society, and a prognosis of what are the best levers for change in a more progressive direction. Capitalism Won’t Deliver There are many things that people need to lead decent lives. But two items are absolutely essential. The first is some guarantee of material security — things like having an income, housing, and basic health care. The second is being free of social domination — if you are under someone else’s control, if they make many of the key decisions for you, then you are constantly vulnerable to abuse. So, in a society in which most people don’t have job security, or have jobs but can’t pay their bills, in which they have to submit to other people’s control, in which they don’t have a voice in how laws and regulations are made — it’s impossible to achieve social justice. Capitalism is an economic system that depends on depriving the vast majority of people of these essential preconditions for a decent life. Workers show up for work every day knowing that they have little job security; they are paid what employers feel is consistent with their main priority, which is making profits, not the well-being of employees; they work at a pace and duration that is set by their bosses; and they submit to these conditions, not because they want to, but because for most of them, the alternative to accepting these conditions is not having a job at all. This is not some incidental or marginal aspect 122

Labor Law Won’t Save Us Joe Burns  •  Jacobin  •  1.27.2015

The labor movement is not just another social movement. It has a special role: to challenge the main source of power in society — accumulation of capital from the labor of workers.

19550

Why do socialists talk so much about workers?

of capitalism. It is the defining feature of the system. Economic and political power is in the hands of capitalists, whose only goal is to maximize profits, which means that the condition of workers is, at best, a secondary concern to them. And that means that the system is, at its very core, unjust. Holding the Lever It follows that the first step to making our society more humane and fair is to reduce the insecurity and material deprivation in The ABCs of Socialism

123

Workers are not only a social group that is systematically exploited, they are also the group best positioned to enact real change.

so many people’s lives, and to increase their scope for self-determination. But we immediately run into a problem — the political resistance of elites. Power is not distributed equally in capitalism. Capitalists decide who is hired and fired, and who works for how long, not workers. Capitalists also have the most political power, because they can do things like lobby, fund political campaigns, and bankroll political parties. And since they are the ones who benefit from the system, why should they encourage changes in it, changes that inevitably mean a diminution in their power and their bottom line? The answer is, they don’t take very kindly to challenges, and they do their best to maintain the status quo. Movements for progressive reform have found time and again that whenever they try to push for changes in the direction of justice, they come up against the power of capital. Any reforms that require a redistribution of income, or come from the government as a social measure — whether it’s health care, environmental regulations, minimum wages, or job programs — are routinely opposed by the wealthy, because any such measures inevitably mean a reduction in their income (as taxes) or their 124

profits. What this means is that progressive reform efforts have to find a source of leverage, a source of power that will enable them to overcome the resistance of the capitalist class and its political functionaries. The working class has this power, for a simple reason — capitalists can only make their profits if workers show up to work every day, and if they refuse to play along, the profits dry up overnight. And if there is one thing that catches employers’ attention, it’s when the money stops flowing. Actions like strikes don’t just have the potential to bring particular capitalists to their knees, they can have an impact far beyond, on layer after layer of other institutions that directly or indirectly depend on them — including the government. This ability to crash the entire system, just by refusing to work, gives workers a kind of leverage that no other group in society has, except capitalists themselves. This is why, if progressive social change requires overcoming capitalist opposition — and we have learned over three centuries that it does — then it is of central importance to organize workers so that they can use that power. Workers are therefore not only a social group that is systematically oppressed and exploited in modern society, they are also the group that is best positioned to enact real change and extract concessions from the major center of power — the bankers and industrialists who run the system. They are the group that comes into contact with capitalists every day and are tied in a perennial conflict with them as a part of their very existence. They are the only group that has to take on capital if they want to improve their lives. There is no more logical force to organize a political movement around. The ABCs of Socialism

Why Class Matters Erik Olin Wright  •  Jacobin  •  12.23.2015

Why do socialists talk so much about workers?

26897

125

And this isn’t just a theory. If we look back at the conditions in which far-reaching reforms have been passed over the past hundred years, reforms which improved the material conditions of the poor, or which gave them more rights against the market — they were invariably based on working-class mobilization. This is true not only with the “color-blind” measures of the welfare state, but even with such phenomena as civil rights and the struggle for the vote. Any movement that extended benefits to the poor, whether they were black or white, male or female, had to base itself on a mobilization of working people. This was true in Europe and the Global South as much as it was in the United States. It is this power to extract real concessions from capital that makes the working class so important for political strategy. Of course, the fact that workers also form the majority in every capitalist society and that they are systematically exploited only makes their plight all the more pressing. This combination of moral urgency and strategic force is why socialist politics is based on the working class.  ■

126

Workers are at the heart of the capitalist system. And that’s why they are at the center of socialist politics.

Will socialism be boring?

Danny Katch

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. This is not my version of 2081, but Kurt Vonnegut’s in the opening lines of his “Harrison Bergeron,” a short story about a future in which everyone is the same. Attractive people are forced to wear masks, smart people have earpieces that regularly distract their thoughts with loud noises, and so on. As one would expect with Vonnegut, there are some darkly hilarious moments — such as a ballet performance in which the dancers are shackled with leg weights — but The ABCs of Socialism

129

130

Culture Isn’t Free Miranda Campbell  •  Jacobin  •  7.2.2015

unlike most of his stories, “Harrison Bergeron” is based on a reactionary premise: equality can only be achieved by reducing the most talented down to the mediocre ranks of the masses. Socialism has often been portrayed in science fiction in these types of gray dystopian terms, which reflect the ambivalence that many artists have toward capitalism. Artists are often repulsed by the anti-human values and commercialized culture of their society, but they are also aware that they have a unique status within it that allows them to express their creative individuality — as long as it sells. They fear that socialism would strip them of that status and reduce them to the level of mere workers, because they are unable to imagine a world that values and encourages the artistic expression of all of its members. Of course there’s another reason that socialist societies are imagined to be grim and dreary: most of the societies that have called themselves socialist have been grim and dreary. Shortly after the revolutions in Eastern Europe that ended the domination of the Soviet Union, the Rolling Stones played a legendary concert in Prague in which they were welcomed as cultural heroes. The catch is that this was 1990, Mick and Keith were almost fifty, and it had been years since their most recent hit, a song called “Harlem Shuffle” that is god-awful. Forget about the censored books and the bans on demonstrations. If you want to understand how boring Stalinist society was, watch the video for “Harlem Shuffle” and then think about one of the coolest cities in Europe going out of its mind with joy at the chance to see those guys.

23040

Will socialism be boring?

To be an effective socialist, it is extremely helpful to like human beings.

Does it really matter if socialism is boring? Perhaps it seems silly, even offensive, to be concerned about such a trivial matter compared to the horrors that capitalism inflicts all the time. Think about the dangers of increasing hurricanes and wildfires caused by climate change, the trauma of losing your home or your job, or the insecurity of not knowing if the man sitting next to you sees you as a target for date rape. We like watching movies about the end of the world or people facing adversity, but in our actual lives most of us prefer predictability and routine. Worrying that socialism might be boring can seem like the ultimate “white people problem,” as the Internet likes to say. Sure it would be nice to eliminate poverty, war, and racism ... but what if I get bored? But it does matter, of course, because we don’t want to live in a society without creativity and excitement, and also because if those things are being stifled then there must be a certain ruling clique or class that is doing the stifling — whether or not they think it’s for our own good. Finally, if socialism is stale and static, it will never be able to replace capitalism, which can accurately be called many nasty things, but boring is not one of them. The ABCs of Socialism

131

132

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity Marshall Berman  •  Verso Books  •  1983

Capitalism has revolutionized the world many times over in the past two hundred years and changed how we think, look, communicate, and work. Just in the past few decades, this system adapted quickly and effectively to the global wave of protests and strikes in the sixties and seventies: unionized factories were closed and relocated to other corners of the world, the stated role of government was shifted from helping people to helping corporations help people, and finally all these changes and others as well were sold to us as what the protesters had been fighting for all along — a world in which every man, woman, and child is born with the equal right to buy as many smartphones and factory-ripped jeans as they want. Capitalism can reinvent itself far more quickly than any previous economic order. “Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form,” write Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, is “the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the capitalist epoch from all earlier ones.” While earlier class societies desperately tried to maintain the status quo, capitalism thrives on overturning it. The result is a world in constant motion. Yesterday’s factory district is today’s slum is tomorrow’s hipster neighborhood. All that is solid melts into air. That’s another line from the Manifesto and also the name of a wonderful book by Marshall Berman, who writes that to live in modern capitalism is “to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy,

12043

Will socialism be boring?

The ABCs of Socialism

24680

The Privatization of Childhood Megan Erickson  •  Jacobin  •  9.3.2015

growth, transformation of ourselves and the world — and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” Yet most of our lives are far from exciting. We work for bosses who want us to be mindless drones. Even when a cool, new invention comes to our workplace, we can count on it to eventually be used to make us do more work in less time, which might arouse the passions of management, but will only fill our days with more drudgery. Outside of work, it’s the same story. Schools see their primary role as providing “career readiness,” which is an inoffensive phrase that means getting kids prepared to handle the bullshit of work. Even the few hours that are supposed to be our own are mostly spent on laundry, cooking, cleaning, checking homework, and all the other necessary tasks to get ourselves and our families ready for work the next day. Most of us only experience the excitement of capitalism as something happening somewhere else: new gadgets for rich people, wild parties for celebrities, amazing performances to watch from your couch. On the bright side, at least most of it is better than “Harlem Shuffle.” Even worse, when we do get to directly touch the excitement, it’s usually because we’re on the business end of it. It’s our jobs being replaced by that incredible new robot, our rent becoming too expensive ever since the beautiful luxury tower was built across the street. Adding insult to injury, we are then told if we complain that we are standing in the way of progress. The sacrifice of individuals in the name of societal progress is said to be one of

133

Time was when my husband used his fists and force. But now he is so tender. For he fears divorce. I no longer fear my husband. If we can’t cooperate, I will take myself to court, and we will separate. Of course, divorce can be heartbreaking as well as liberating. Revolutions cast everything in a new light, from our leaders to our loved ones, which can be both exciting and excruciating. “Gigantic events,” wrote Trotsky in a 1923 newspaper article, “have descended on the family in its old shape, the war and the revolution. And following them came creeping slowly the underground mole  — critical thought, the conscious study and evaluation of family relations 134

12043

The Two Souls of Socialism Hal Draper  •  New Politics  •  Winter 1966

the horrors of socialism, a world run by faceless bureaucrats supposedly acting for the common good. But there are plenty of invisible and unelected decision-makers under capitalism, from health insurance officials who don’t know us but can determine whether our surgery is “necessary” to billionaire-funded foundations that declare schools they have never visited to be “failures.” Socialism also involves plenty of change, upheaval, and even chaos, but this chaos, as Hal Draper might have said, comes from below. During the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik-led Soviet government removed marriage from the control of the church one month after taking power and allowed couples to get divorced at the request of either partner. These laws dramatically changed family dynamics and women’s lives, as evidenced by some of the song lyrics that become popular in rural Russian villages:

Will socialism be boring?

and forms of life. No wonder that this process reacts in the most intimate and hence most painful way on family relationships.” In another article, Trotsky described daily experience in revolutionary Russia as “the process by which everyday life for the working masses is being broken up and formed anew.” Like capitalism, these first steps toward socialism offered both the promise of creation and the threat of destruction, but with the crucial difference that the people Trotsky wrote about were playing an active role in determining how their world was changing. They were far from having complete control, especially over the mass poverty and illiteracy that the tsar and world war had bequeathed to them. But even in these miserable conditions, the years between the October Revolution and Stalin’s final consolidation of power demonstrated the excitement of a society in which new doors are open to the majority classes for the first time. There was an explosion of art and culture. Cutting-edge painters and sculptors decorated the public squares of Russian cities with their futurist art. For the record, Lenin hated the futurists, but this didn’t stop the government from funding their journal, Art of the Commune. Ballets and theaters were opened up to mass audiences. Cultural groups and workers’ committees came together to bring art and artistic training into factories. The filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein gained world renown for the groundbreaking technique of his movies depicting the Russian Revolution. The silly premise of “Harrison Bergeron” was refuted. Socialism didn’t find talented The ABCs of Socialism

135

artists to be a threat to “equality” or find a contradiction between appreciating individual artists and opening up the previously elitist art world to the masses of workers and peasants. The possibilities of socialism that the world glimpsed in Russia for a few years were not a sterile experiment controlled by a handful of theorists but a messy and thrilling creation of tens of millions of people groping toward a different way of running society and treating one another, with all the skills, impediments, and neuroses they had acquired through living under capitalism, in the horrible circumstances of a poor, war-torn country. They screwed up in all sorts of ways, but they also showed that socialism is a real possibility, not a utopian dream that doesn’t fit the needs of real human beings. And the society they were pointing toward was a place where equality meant not lowering but raising the overall cultural and intellectual level of society. In the many novels, movies, and other artistic renderings of socialism, there is little mention of rising divorce rates and heated debates about art. Most of them imagine societies without conflict, which is why they seem so creepy — including the ones intending to promote socialism. A similar problem exists inside many protest movements today, in which some activists want to organize movements and meetings around a consensus model, which means that almost everybody present has to agree on a decision for it to get passed. Consensus can sometimes be an effective way to build trust among people who don’t know and trust one another, especially because most people in this supposedly 136

Will socialism be boring?

Most of us only experience the excitement of capitalism as something happening somewhere else: new gadgets for rich people, wild parties for celebrities, amazing performances to watch from your couch.

democratic society have almost no experience participating in the democratic process of discussion, debate, and then a majority-rule vote. When organizers view consensus not only as a temporary tactic but as a model for how society should be run, however, there is a problem. I want to live in a democratic society with conflicts and arguments, where people aren’t afraid to stand up for what they believe in and don’t feel pressured to soften their opinions so that, when a compromise is reached, we can pretend that we all agreed in the first place. If your case for socialism rests on the idea that people will stop getting into arguments and even occasionally acting like jerks, you should probably find another cause. Socialism isn’t going to be created, Lenin once wrote, with “abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism. True, that is no easy matter, but no other approach The ABCs of Socialism

137

to this task is serious enough to warrant discussion.” To be an effective socialist, it is extremely helpful to like human beings. Not humanity as a concept but real, sweaty people. In All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Berman tells a story about Robert Moses, the famous New York City public planner who flattened entire neighborhoods that stood in the way of the exact spots where he envisioned new highways. Moses, a friend once said, “loved the public, but not as people.” He built parks, beaches, and highways for the masses to use, even as he loathed most of the working-class New Yorkers he encountered. Loving the public but not people is also a feature of elitist socialists, whose faith rests more on five-year development plans, utopian blueprints, or winning future elections than on the wonders that hundreds of millions can achieve when they are inspired and liberated. That is why their visions for socialism are so lifeless and unimaginative. By contrast, Marx, who is often presented as an isolated intellectual, was a rowdy, argumentative, funny, passionate person who once declared that his favorite saying was the maxim: “I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” I find it hard to see how a world run by the majority of human beings, with all of our gloriously and infuriatingly different talents, personalities, madnesses, and passions, could possibly be boring.  ■

138

Socialism isn’t about inducing bland mediocrity. It’s about unleashing the creative potential of all.

Notes

Notes

Notes

Notes

$14.95/£8.99/$19.50CAN