In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama called for “middle-class economics” — a brand of capitalism where workers would keep a bigger piece of the pie. But Obama’s latest promise is so much pie in the sky. A system based on the exploitation of the working class — and enforced by capitalists’ state power — can never serve workers’ needs. The two classes are diametrically opposed. “Middle-class economics” reflects an embattled, crisis-ridden U.S. ruling class that is running scared — scared of what could become a communist working-class revolution.
The day after Obama’s speech, in an opinion piece headlined, “Can Capitalists Save Capitalism?” the New York Times referenced a May 2014 conference in London. The Conference topic was “inclusive capitalism,” a concept put forward in 2002 by academics at the University of Michigan and Cornell. In a widely cited article, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” they pointed to the potential profit that could be generated by “the fourth tier,” the world’s poorest four billion people.
Addressing the London conference was Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which impoverishes workers worldwide on behalf of U.S. bankers. Despite the reversals of the revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, communism remains the main threat to capitalist rulers around the world. Lagarde echoed Marx’s warning that capitalism, as she paraphrased, “carried the seeds of its own destruction, the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few, mostly focused on the accumulation of profits….”
Speaking for her fellow bosses, Lagarde voiced concern about “high unemployment, rising social tensions, and growing political disillusion — all of this happening in the wake of the Great Recession. One of the main casualties has been trust — in leaders, in institutions, in the free market system itself.” She pointed to a recent poll showing that fewer than one in five people believed that “governments or business leaders would tell the truth on an important issue.”
The contradiction of capitalism is that it is ultimately undermined by the inequality that creates profit, the system’s lifeblood. As Lagarde acknowledged, “The 85 richest people in the world, who could fit into a single London double-decker [bus], control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population — that is 3.5 billion people….This is a wakeup call.”
Rulers’ Worry: Marx Was Right
As Progressive Labor Party has pointed out, only the destruction of the capitalist profit system — and its bosses, wars, racism and sexism, exploitation and permanent mass unemployment — can solve our class’s problems. Only a communist society, led by the working class and its revolutionary party, can end the rulers’ atrocities.
Obama’s capitalist benefactors cooked up his phony “redistribution” scheme in their think tanks. Knowing full well that a Republican-dominated Congress would block them, Obama proposed tax hikes on big banks and the rich to pay for tax credits and free community college for working families. But the Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the same racist, anti-worker organization. While they may differ on tactics and occasionally on strategy, their goal is always the same: to squeeze maximum profits out of the working class.
Like all capitalist politicians, Obama has no intention of helping our class. His job is to dupe more workers into voting and accepting tightened government control. U.S. rulers, top dogs since World War II, face intensifying challenges from their imperialist rivals — China, Russia, Japan, and the European Union. Global conflict is edging closer by the day. The U.S. imperialists desperately need to convince U.S. workers that they have a stake in fighting — and dying — for the profit system.
At the London conference, Lagarde endorsed “inclusive capitalism” as “the response to Marx’s dire prediction,” and the key “to capitalism’s survival and regeneration.” By critiquing income inequality, liberal capitalists hope to mislead workers and quell the recent wave of rebellions from Mexico to Turkey to Gaza to Ferguson, Missouri.
Racism Essential to Capitalism’s Existence
Racist exploitation is the cornerstone of capitalism. The U.S. bosses reap more than $600 billion annually in super-profits from the gap in family income between white workers and Black or Latin workers. The profit system is the source of racist cop terror and the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. It is the root of segregated housing and schools and of third-rate health care. It’s the foundation for the racist, criminal injustice system, where 70 percent of the 2.2 million prisoners in U.S. prisons and jails are Black or Latin.
When white workers are won to accept these racist attacks, it weakens the fightback of the entire working class. As a result, the capitalists are freer to maintain their profits with mass layoffs during recessions and depressions — and to drag down white workers’ wages and conditions, as well.
Racist inequalities are pervasive in capitalism. Witness the corporate movement to low-wage countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where two billion workers try to survive on $2 a day. Or the racist anti-immigrant attacks in the European Union, where “foreign” workers are widely blamed for rising unemployment.
In their efforts to buy working-class loyalty, U.S. rulers could afford jobs programs and improvements in workers’ standard of living during and immediately after World War II. But the current generation of U.S. bosses, beset on many fronts, cannot. The 1950’s American Dream — a good union job, a cheap home mortgage, college for the kids, a decent pension — was a reality for some workers of that era, most of them white. In 2015, it is a stinking lie.
Bosses’ Big Concern: Workers’ Revolution
On January 15, the Inclusive Prosperity Commission weighed in on the current crisis of world capitalism. The report’s authors were ex-U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and British Labor Party hack Ed Balls. Published by the Center for American Progress, the study was solely funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. In effect, it rated working-class revolution as more dangerous than the menaces posed by China, Russia, ISIS or al Qaeda:
The primary challenge democracies face is neither military nor philosophical. Rather, for the first time since the Great Depression, many industrial democracies are failing to raise living standards and provide opportunities for social mobility to a large share of their people….This is an economic problem that threatens to become a problem for the political systems of these nations — and for the idea of democracy itself.
The “economic problem” for these “democracies” (the term the bosses use for their electoral dictatorships) is capitalism, the profit system itself. The capitalists control state power — the apparatus of government, the military, courts, cops, and media — and use it to protect their profits. While the capitalists may temporarily improve workers’ pay and conditions, their system requires the absolute exploitation of our class. Any scraps they throw at us are taken back in their next economic crisis.
The Center for American Progress squarely represents the capitalist class. It was founded by John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff during the bloody bombing of Bosnia and now top campaign advisor to war-maker Hillary Clinton. Its number two is Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s mass-murdering Secretary of State. When asked in 2001 about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions that withheld food and medicine, Albright told CBS TV, “We think the price is worth it.”
Join and Build PLP
PLP’s goal is to destroy these butchers and smash the system behind them. With workers’ trust in the capitalist government and system on the wane, it is time to sharpen struggles in all our organizations and lead workers against this failing society. We have a tremendous opportunity to win masses to join and build the Progressive Labor Party and a communist future.