ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: Cast Off Chains of Oppression

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Cast Off Chains of Oppression

By Guy Watson
UNM Faculty, Retired
          Capitalism is, by its nature, a class war.
        The only way for someone to get richer is for someone else to get poorer. In an adversarial system the adversaries are workers and capitalists. The workers struggle for adequate wages and benefits so they can buy the products of the capitalist system. Capitalists struggle to increase their profits by reducing their costs and increasing the price or quantity sold of their products.
        A primary cost to the capitalist is the worker's wage and pension. No amount of dreaming will create a capitalistic system that has a primary goal of helping the worker attain better wages and satisfactory benefits.
        If the people's elected representatives went to Washington and represented the people, not the money that helped them win their elections, they would regulate the capitalist's profit-making in a way that allowed both business and labor to flourish. But in capitalism there is no limit to the drive for increased profits. Profits must increase each day, each month, each year.
        To accomplish this, capitalists must control the political behavior of the people's representatives, lest they regulate away potential profit. This is and has been accomplished by buying the people's representatives.
        The tools to accomplish this are well known: huge donations, gifts, perks and by having an army of lobbyists and advertising firms working to persuade the people's representatives to support the goals of the capitalist over the needs of the worker.
        With these same political tools the capitalists covertly support the political division of the working class through the use of "hot button" social issues. This strategy diverts the worker's political energy away from the pocketbook and away from issues that would reduce profit, thus further eroding the power of the working class.
        Has all this money and covert manipulation of political and social issues worked? Yes, dramatically well. Today the top 20 percent of wealthy individuals own about 85 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 40 percent own very near zero. Many in that bottom 40 percent not only have no assets, but they have negative net wealth.
        Has this increase in profit and the increase in the gap made the capitalist happy? No. Today the pressure from big money in our state and federal capitals is to further reduce workers' wages, reduce workers' bargaining rights, reduce or completely eliminate workers' pensions and kill any health bill that might cost capital some profit.
        After the Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision, capitalists became an even more powerful force in America for controlling the behavior of the people's elected representatives. The money funneled into campaigns can control who gets elected and how they will vote when they get in office.
        Is this some left-wing fanaticism? No. Are unions supporting the workers? Yes. Do they offset corporate spending? No. Union membership dropped from 33 percent of the workforce in the 1940s to an average today of 12 percent of the workforce. Many workers' jobs have been sent overseas to increase corporate profit.
        Unions run a poor second in supporting the worker compared with the contributions from the business sector encouraged by the Chamber of Commerce, which donated over 90 percent of its money to Republicans to assure continuing profits and minimum regulations.
        Corporations, businesses and the rich in America have subverted the democratic process and corrupted the American Dream. Dollars have trumped votes.
        The only effective force to combat this one-sided class war is for the middle class, the workers in America, to organize and through their incredible numbers pressure their elected representatives and the nation's profit-hungry businesses into realizing that without a healthy, respected, adequately paid worker who can bargain with capital for the benefit of all Americans, then the American Dream will become a nightmare.
        When one side holds all the levers of economic power, the system becomes nothing more than a fascistic system catering to profit for the few. "Government of the People, by the People, for the People" is lost.

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