- Information
What’s the Ruling Class? In A Capitalist State, Capitalists Rule
- Information
- 06 June 2014 261 hits
When communists talk of a “ruling class,” many people smugly dismiss it as a paranoid conspiracy theory.
The wealthiest top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. controls a larger share of the national wealth (35.4 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (23.3 percent). And their share is growing. Between 1985 and 2010 nearly three quarters of all wealth gains went to the top 5 percent with the bottom 60 percent seeing a net loss. (EPI, The State of Working America)
The current economic crisis is accelerating the funneling of money and wealth to the top. A study by Emmanuel Saez found that between 2009 and 2010 (the first year of the supposed recovery), the top 1percent seized 93 percent of all income gains, validating former treasury secretary Andrew Mellon’s 1929 statement that “In a depression, assets return to their rightful owners” (Striking it Richer, 3/2/2012).
A new study in the forthcoming issue of Perspectives in Politics (Fall 2014) shows that the ruling class shapes public opinion policy. The authors, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, studied 1,779 national policy initiatives pursued between 1981 and 2002 in the U.S. comparing elite opinion with that of the general public and then analyzing which direction policy went. The results are indisputable:
“In the United States… the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose… even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”
When the working class does get a policy they generally favor, it is “only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens who wield the actual influence.” Any feeling of political efficacy among individual workers is purely coincidental. Ultimately the policy preferences of the working class “appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Gilens and Page’s study conclusively shows that individual capitalists and business lobbyists (representing organized groups of capitalists) shape the political landscape in the U.S. In short, a ruling class of individuals making up only a tiny segment of the population wield most—if not all—formal political power. This finding is bolstered by a recent report done by Demos, a research and policy center, breaking down support for raising the federal minimum wage. The study found that while 78 percent of the general public (the bottom 99 percent of earners) support a hike in the minimum wage 60 percent of the wealthy (the top 1 percent) oppose it. Thus, when Congress recently refused to move on a bill to raise the minimum wage, they were simply carrying out their mandate to represent the capitalist class.
Of course this is nothing new. In the mid-19th century Marx wrote that all states, no matter what their superficial appearance (democracy, monarchy) are in essence class dictatorships. In a capitalist state, capitalists rule. Those capitalists who wield the most influence make up the ruling class. As the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Jay stated upon the country’s founding, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” It is indisputable that in the U.S., a very small percentage of people own most of the country and they govern it. The ruling class may conspire, but they are no conspiracy theory.
- Information
From Turkey to Nigeria to Iraq... Imperialist Strategy Drives Atrocities
- Information
- 23 May 2014 220 hits
On May 13, 301 miners died in a preventable disaster in western Turkey. Like the girls taken captive this month in Nigeria, or the garment workers killed a year ago in Bangladesh, or the workers slain by U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were victims of capitalism and its relentless drive to maximize profits. For capitalist bosses in the U.S. and around the world, the lives of workers have no value except for surplus value — the difference between the value that workers produce and what they are paid. Since the ruling class holds absolute state power and controls the factories and other means of production, the working class is enslaved by the profit system. This will change only when we smash these bosses, eliminate the profit system, and seize state power. Only under communism will workers become society’s first concern.
U.S. imperialists, the worst mass murderers in history, condemn or ignore atrocities according to their strategic needs. When Turkish bosses killed the miners of Soma, spurring militant protests, U.S. media — serving their ruling-class owners — covered the story in self-righteous detail. After Islamic forces kidnapped more than 250 girls in Nigeria, Michelle Obama took over her husband’s weekly video address to express her “outrage and heartbreak.” But a mounting wave of sectarian bombings in Iraq, where nearly five thousand civilians have been slaughtered so far this year, has received hardly any mention by the rulers or their pressrooms. If anything, they have encouraged violent defiance of the Shiite regime in Baghdad by allowing ExxonMobil to make oil production deals with Kurdistan and the Sunni Nineveh province.
Why the discrepancy in reporting? It’s explained by the sharpening rivalry among the world’s leading powers: a declining but still preeminent U.S. empire; a resurgent Russian ruling class; and a rising Chinese military and economy. Ultimately headed for global conflict, this imperialist dogfight reaches far beyond the hot spots in Ukraine and the South China Sea.
Profits Throw Safety Out the Window
Profit-hungry Turkish coal barons were exposed in the energy industry bulletin OilPrice.com (5/16/14), which reported that mine owner Alp Gurkan “boasted in 2012... that his company had reduced the cost of coal production from $140 to $24 per ton.” Gurkan managed the feat by throwing safety measures out the window. But as the U.S. media plays agonizing images of bodies emerging from the Soma coal pit, their aim is less to blame Gurkan than to undermine Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s president. Although Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952, it declined to join the U.S.-led protest against Russia’s annexation of Crimea and even increased its energy imports from Russia. With a faltering Turkish economy and mass protests in the street, U.S. rulers now consider Erdogan’s corrupt regime unreliable.
Last year, Foreign Affairs, the arch-imperialist journal representing U.S. finance capital and its Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank, complained that Turkey made “a fateful decision to choose a Chinese HQ-9 T-LORAMIDS missile defense system over Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin’s Patriots” (5/15/14). Erdogan also cancelled a NATO-sponsored naval modernization drive. In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Foreign Affairs (and its main backers, ExxonMobil and JP Morgan Chase) worried that Turkey had “no reassuring plan to counter Russia’s expansion of the Black Sea fleet.”
Turkey’s loyalty to NATO is of huge importance to U.S. strategists. Shortly before Chuck Hagel was named Secretary of Defense, as head of the Atlantic Council think tank he published a 2013 report that named Turkey, Brazil, India and Indonesia as “democratic” military counterweights to Russia and China in coming decades. In other words, Turkey fills the Middle East slot on the Pentagon’s roster for global war.
Finance Muslim Millionaire,
Attack Muslim Immigrants
There’s a reason why images of an Erdogan aide kicking a Soma protester played endlessly in U.S. newspapers and on television networks. Yet U.S. cops beat working-class black and Latino youth hundreds of times a day with no media attention. Cop attacks on Muslim immigrants, amid the rise of anti-Muslim racism, is ignored. But with U.S. rulers possibly readying to oust Erdogan, Turkey is a different case. According to the Economist, Erdogan’s critics, “now led by Fethullah Gulen, Turkey’s most influential Muslim cleric, who commands an empire of schools and media outlets from self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, will seize on the Soma tragedy” in Turkey’s presidential election in August (5/17/14).
U.S. bosses have patiently nurtured Gulen’s movement as a pro-U.S., moderate Islamic force. CIA bigwigs got Gulen his green card; a former high-ranking Turkish intelligence official described the movement as a CIA front that sheltered more than one hundred U.S. agents in Central Asia in the 1990s. Today the U.S. Department of Education pours millions in grants into Gulen’s vast charter school network. Back in Turkey, Gulenists have infiltrated the security apparatus. Meanwhile, undercover police are sent into mosques in New York and New Jersey to terrorize Muslims into becoming informants for the bosses’ fraudulent “war on terror.”
Africa Command Humanitarian?
Who’s Kidding Who?
In Nigeria, U.S. rulers are manipulating the Boko Haram kidnap crisis with similarly cynical motives. The mass abduction opens the door for military action in Africa’s most populous and oil-rich nation. The U.S. imperialists’ hidden agenda is to plant Africom, the Pentagon’s Africa Command, in a country that has been reluctant to embrace it. Africom military “advisors” arrived in Nigeria in mid-May to “save the girls,” even as they launched drone strikes in other Muslim countries and killed innocent children.
Of course, U.S. rulers hide the fact that their Middle East allies are financing Boko Haram: “The French intelligence services pointed out last week that their reports have long since ‘pointed out that...Boko Haram had received the backing of the oil monarchies.’” (le Canard enchaîné, 5/21).
The bosses’ public relations crusade in Nigeria is at odds with their exploitation of women in the U.S. and worldwide. Women are paid less than men for comparable work. They are treated as sex objects in the popular media and in the U.S. military, where sexual attacks are epidemic. U.S. companies freely exploit women garment workers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. And the U.S. government uncritically backs Middle Eastern oil kingdoms that not only oppresses women citizens, but also force women migrants from Asia into virtual slavery as domestic workers, creating a multi-fractured working class entrenched in sexism.
Africa is vital to U.S. imperialist interests. In March 2007, just after President George W. Bush authorized Africom, Foreign Affairs called its creation “long overdue in light of U.S. dependence on Africa’s oil, its concern over radical Islamist groups targeting the region, and the continent’s identity as an arena for intense diplomatic competition with other states with global ambitions, like China” (5/3/07). The command was conceived as a blueprint for an imperialist task force.
In short, U.S. bosses’ crocodile tears over murdered miners and kidnapped teenagers are a cover for their incursions into Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. (While the U.S. has launched thousands of killer drones, the Pentagon has barely flown a single search mission over Nigeria.) With little U.S. working-class support for the rulers’ so-called War on Terror, they need workers and especially the youth — their prospective soldiers — to buy into this humanitarian sham and back a pro-imperialist movement.
Remember the “humanitarian” U.S. mission in Yugoslavia that bombed and killed tens of thousands and devastated the region’s infrastructure? It also established a permanent military base in Kosovo with 14,000 troops on hand for future forays to protect U.S. bosses’ profits. Or how about the two wars for “democracy” in Iraq that killed or displaced more than five million Iraqis? The payoff was control for Exxon
Mobil over the vast West Qurna oil field.
Build an International PLP
Progressive Labor Party is fighting to build an international communist movement that will build solidarity with the victims of imperialism in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and throughout the world. Fighting to destroy the profit system is the way to show real concern for exploited workers and their children, from the mines of Turkey to the forests of Nigeria.
We must build PLP into a force that can destroy capitalism and erect a communist society free of bosses and profits, of racism and sexism and imperialist wars that murder millions. This is the road to ending the murder of miners and the kidnapping of schoolchildren. Join PLP and the fight for our lives and our future generations!
- Information
Invade Hospital, Hit Bosses’ Attack on Retirees’ Funds
- Information
- 23 May 2014 200 hits
PHILADELPHIA, PA, May 7 — “Here we go again!” Venetta said as 50 Local 1199C Hospital Workers Union retirees marched spontaneously to Jefferson Hospital demanding the hospital bosses stop their attacks on our union Benefit and Pension Funds. We’re older now so we marched a little slower, several with canes, several with oxygen tanks.
Forty years ago Venetta and many of these workers broke the law and filled up buses headed to jail to bring in this union and its benefits. Now retired, Venetta and the rest of us don’t want to give up pension and health benefits that we worked for and that help keep us alive and out of complete poverty. But as many of us see it, the capitalist economic crisis is deepening and all the small wars promise to become bigger ones.
Because the capitalist class rules the government, no matter who’s in the White House, all the improvement Venetta and our class fought decades to achieve are being taken back. Here we go again! What could be more important or a more organic part of this fight — not an outside issue — than PLP’s call for the working class to get off the capitalist merry-go-round and fight for communist revolution, where the working class runs the government for an equal society?
Our initial plan was to confront a Jefferson boss from Personnel. However, Personnel relocated to a more secure building away from the hospital. Its previous location was easily accessible and the target of many past marches. Is that why Personnel’s now on the ninth floor of a guarded building? Personnel refused to allow the 50 of us up to their office and refused to come down to meet us. So, we held a meeting in the lobby.
Then we decided to march to Jefferson Administration in the main hospital building, enabling 1199C members at work to see us. Apparently Jefferson security is a little rusty because as slow as we moved — and although we had to wait while everyone went to restrooms (remember we ain’t young!) — we still beat Security to the Executive Administration offices and filled the waiting area and hallway outside.
A Jefferson Vice-President came out to reprimand us but quickly regretted that decision. The retirees shouted him down. One retiree in particular, Jewel, all five feet of her, simply yelled in his face, “I need my medicine! I need my medicine!” repeatedly and loudly until the over-six-foot Vice-President actually seemed about to cry. When another Security Lieutenant rushed into the office, Jewel spun around and yelled, “I know your mother! I know your mother!” The security officer retreated. After a period of yelling and screaming, the Vice-President promised to arrange a meeting and took contact numbers for the retired shop stewards who led the march.
The stakes in this fight are dire. Our union is multi-racial — black, white, Asian and Latino. We’re all hurting. But this attack is particularly racist and sexist because this union is predominantly black and women, who suffer the worst health and healthcare under this system. If Jefferson and the other hospital bosses succeed in destroying our Benefit and Pension fund it will kill many union members and amount to outright murder.
Venetta’s declaration of “here we go again” demands that we get out of capitalism’s losing game. The capitalists run the government, they hold state power with a dictatorship of the bosses. We need a workers’ government, a dictatorship of the working class. Our future actions in this fight must have the long-term goal of workers joining PLP to build for communist revolution, for a society that abolishes wage slavery. We need a society where older workers, all workers, don’t suffer poverty and starvation, where workers get the medicine they need simply because they need it! (To contact PLP call 267-319-3515.)
NEW YORK CITY, May 7 — More than 1,000 low wage workers and their supporters jammed into Riverside Church tonight, in a “Service for Low Wage Workers.” The service was billed as “We Are All Workers!” The very integrated and international crowd of women and men were in high spirits, feeling their unity and ready for a fight. The speakers included fast food, airport, retail and car wash workers. Challenge was sold.
The rally was mainly organized by SEIU, United NY, and the various unions involved in the different organizing drives. The idea was to rally 25 clergy from around the city to give “moral authority” to the campaign to raise the minimum wage. The low wage workers who spoke were given two-minutes each, and if they went over, someone was there to tap them on the back. The clergy, on the other hand, preachers, rabbis, priests and imams, couldn’t shut up when given a microphone and a big crowd. Throw in the head of the NY Central Labor Council and the Speaker of the NY City Council and workers were eager to get out of there and on the buses taking them home.
The class struggle may be heating up a bit, and the unions and Democratic Party are looking to increase their numbers by targeting low-wage workers. In the process of organizing them, they are leading workers away from communist revolution and into the arms of the imperialist war-makers and their religious lackeys. We have to do better at fighting for the political leadership of these workers. The union leaders want to win mostly black, Latino, Asian and women workers to settle for a wage that might put them just above the poverty line. PLP wants to abolish wage slavery with communist revolution.
- Information
Red Eye on Two Movies: Expose Mandela; Exploitation in the Sugar Fields
- Information
- 23 May 2014 203 hits
PLP Saturday night movie events at Roxbury Community College have developed from social events to serious base-building, with friends joining with us to learn and discuss our ideas, based on the films. The discussions have been very sharp and informative: Everyone who came with us knows we fight for communism, and the movies we chose open up real discussion. Multiracial and multigenerational groups of 20 to 30 have attended.
The February movie was John Pilger’s “Apartheid Did Not Die,” a documentary of post-apartheid South Africa that shows how Mandela and his successors in the black-majority government and African National Congress (ANC) have strangled the working class under the tight grip of rampant capitalism. The film was selected to critically analyze Nelson Mandela and his political work with a “red eye.” The participants included students, professors, current and retired workers from South America, Haiti, U.S., Africa and the Middle East.
The documentary shows how Mandela joined forces with President F. W. de Klerk claiming to “abolish apartheid” and establish multiracial elections in 1994, which has left the black majority in extreme poverty and still under brutal capitalism and segregation. In this compromised state, Mandela became President. He and the ANC had become the new faces of capitalism. Continuing dire poverty and misery demands communist revolution as the only real alternative.
The discussion was both sharp and informative. When asked: “How did Mandela serve the ruling class and capitalists by cooperating with de Klerk?” several people pointed out the contradiction that Mandela is portrayed by the Western ruling class and media as a hero to his people and an inspiration to all. All agreed that this documentary exposed a very different view of Mandela. Pilger’s interviews and film clips of miners, and the dangerous and desperate conditions under which they live, really moved people to anger when contrasted with the excessive wealth of the South African ruling class portrayed in the film.
It becomes apparent from the documentary that, like many others who start out opposing colonial capitalist rulers, Mandela sold out to them in the end, striking a deal with de Klerk to cooperate and collaborate with the ruling class. A belief in nationalism often leads to new faces on capitalism, but only a working-class revolution can end it.
Our March movie, “The Price of Sugar,” shows the organizing efforts of immigrant sugar cane cutters from Haiti against horrific working and living conditions in the Dominican Republic. The film reveals the crimes of the sugar capitalist Viccini family and the role of the Dominican and U.S. governments in perpetuating this racist exploitation.
In the documentary, we see the workers are under armed guard and not allowed to leave the plantation. They make 90¢ a day — but only in vouchers for the high-priced company store. They come to the Dominican Republic to hope for a better life, but their lives are like those of the first African slaves who were used in the Americas to cut sugar cane. Recently, the Dominican Constitutional Court ruled to strip citizenship from several generations of Dominicans of Haitian descent, including many who had come to cut cane and hope for a better life.
The discussion helped many understand the limits of reform movements. Without a class analysis, without communist revolution, the same system continues in power. Even if some workers burned down the plantations, the sugar capitalists still have their government and military to oppress the workers. One important point was how racism justifies cheap labor. Why do these subhuman conditions exist under capitalism? They exist to maximize bosses’ profits from the labor of some workers while at the same time driving down the wages of all workers.
Both movies helped reach out to more people politically and spread the understanding that capitalism is a brutal system, which must be eliminated. Some joined us in NYC for May Day.