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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.
So long as the fundamental structures of the economy remain unchanged,
state action will disproportionately benefit capitalist interests at the expense of everything else.
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.
Rather, through the functioning of its most basic processes, capitalism generates severe deficits of both freedom and democracy that it can never remedy.
Poverty in the midst of plenty exists because of a direct equation between material resources and the resources needed for self-determination.
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.
The highest paid executive is Discovery Communications’ David Zaslav, who made over $150 million in 2014. His great contribution to the human endeavor? Helping to air “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.”
socialists call for a significant portion of the social product to be controlled publicly and democratically redistributed downward.
individual and corporate income is made possible only through tax-financed state action.
Second, governments 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.
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
Capitalists are able to accumulate large stores of wealth only because workers do not.
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.
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.
The rich didn’t earn their wealth—they’re just holding on to it for us. ▪
We simply don’t want a world without personal property—the things meant for individual consumption. Instead, socialists strive for a society without private property—the things that give the people who own them power over those who don’t.
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 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, child-care, a college education—which are also commodities, produced by other workers who are not fully remunerated for their efforts either.
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.
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.
the affluent have abandoned their commitment to even basic democracy when they felt threatened by worker movements.
Socialists fight for economic democracy out of the radical democratic belief that “what touches all should be decided by all.”
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.
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.
In a system driven solely by the
profit motive, there is little incentive to address workers’ needs beyond the dictates of the market.
But capital can never be fully at ease, either, because exploitation everywhere breeds resistance.
Socialism identifies the source of such dehumanization—private ownership and exploitation—and rejects it.
Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
environmental problems don’t respect political borders: ecological interdependence is another reminder that sustainability will come only through global solidarity.
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 could make sure everyone had access to clean, cheap electricity, for instance, before devoting resources to making electronic toys for the wealthy.
Capitalism began by enclosing public and common resources for private benefit and dispossessing their previous users.
“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, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.”
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.
Capitalism is an economic system that depends on depriving the vast majority of people of these essential preconditions for a decent life.
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.
