In our final installment of the Unifor Interview Series with union leaders, staff, and rank-and-file members, we speak with Gary Engler, Vice-President of Unifor Local 2000, the Media Union of BC. Gary also recently penned two articles at Rabble.ca, “Thoughts on Labour Day” and “Unifor and the potential rebirth of militant union activism.” He recently co-authored “The New Commune-ist Manifesto: Workers of the World It Really Is Time To Unite“.
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Why is there so much attention paid to people as consumers, but so little to people as workers?
Is it because the mere mention of our rights as workers brings up all kinds of uncomfortable truths that threaten the very ideological foundations of the current economic system?
As we celebrate Labour Day these are important questions to ponder.
The vast majority of us are wageworkers. Wages are our primary source of income. Or we collect a pension because we and/or our spouse were once workers. Or we are dependents of workers.
In fact a huge proportion of the money spent by consumers in our economy comes directly or indirectly from our wages as workers.
Despite this obvious reality, while the media is jam-packed with material about consumer rights, consumer choice, ads claiming the best price for consumers, stories about politicians claiming “to do what’s best for consumers” and much more focused on consumption, there is almost nothing about work or workers’ rights. Typically what little there is concerns strikes or other “disruptions” to the economy. It’s as if workers are just cogs in a giant machine, only worth discussing when a breakdown occurs. There’s certainly no money to be made promoting workers’ rights; in fact we are seen primarily as a cost that reduces profit.
Yes, there is some lip service given to workers as a resource; words to the effect that “we’re all in this together” might be spoken, but real examples of workplace democracy are few and very far between. If workers were truly valued as people “all in this together” wouldn’t there be at least some semblance of democracy at work?
Instead, under our current economic system, the master-servant relationship is the legal framework that dominates workplaces.
Reality for most workers, which means most people, is a fundamental lack of respect at work. That’s why “the system” prefers to focus on us as consumers rather than as workers.
So what, one might ask? What’s the big deal if we must give up being treated as an equal human being at work, so long as we are well paid? The object of work is to make enough money so that we can consume what we want and enjoy the good life, nothing more.
Aside from the fact many of us are not well paid, the answer to the question “so what?” is that work is an essential element of human identity. When asked at a party, “what do you do?” not many of us answer: “I shop.” And if we did, what would that say about us?
What we do — work — is what defines us, what makes us human. We want a job that is a source of lasting satisfaction, not simply consumption. When the system does not provide that sense of satisfaction at work alienation is the result. This leads to stress, addictions and other forms of ill health.
Even some unions become complicit in this alienation, focusing exclusively on getting more money, which is another way of agreeing with right wing supporters of the existing system that its members are just consumers.
These right wingers want us to only care about more money. They want us to consume more. Smart capitalists are Keynesians. They want workers to demand more and to spend more. But we’ve reached the limit of Keynesianism in two senses: Capitalists have abandoned it en masse so appeals for them to return to some golden era of Keynes is a pathetic dead end. And even if the capitalists were willing to give us more, more has become an environmental dead end.
Instead workers and their unions must learn to dream bigger.
We must learn to demand more than simply more.
Gary Engler
This Labour Day weekend promises to be an exciting time for the Canadian union movement and perhaps a spark for workers around the world.
The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) are merging to create Unifor, the largest primarily private sector union in Canada with about 300,000 members.
The new union offers the potential of something great for the future of unions and the Left. Many good things will happen if Unifor fulfills the promise of its new constitution. For example, Article 2 — 10 states: “Our goal is transformative. To reassert common interest over private interest. Our goal is to change our workplaces and our world. Our vision is compelling. It is to fundamentally change the economy, with equality and social justice, restore and strengthen our democracy and achieve an environmentally sustainable future. This is the basis of social unionism — a strong and progressive union culture and a commitment to work in common cause with other progressives in Canada and around the world.”
A union that is militant, outward looking, engaged politically and willing to work with progressive people outside the labour movement is exactly what we need to motivate a new generation of activists. The future of unions depends on harnessing the energy, enthusiasm and political sensibility of young people in and about to enter the workforce. To accomplish that unions must be involved with community struggles, seen to be battling injustice and willing to work with anyone who shares our common causes.
I remember being a student at the University of British Columbia in 1972 and walking my first picket line during a SORWUC (Canada’s first feminist union) strike at a Denny’s on Broadway St. in Vancouver. Walking the line was a way of showing support for women’s rights in general, as well as helping the few dozen people actually on strike. And it set in motion decades of further involvement in the union movement.
Unifor’s new constitution has many progressive features. It requires gender equality on the national executive. It commits 10 per cent of national dues to organizing. It calls for “community chapters” that “can help build strong communities and enhance our collective strength in the struggle for social and economic justice by opening our Union to workers who currently have no access to union membership, because they have no collective agreement, or job, or hold temporary contract or other precarious employment.”
The potential for building community chapters that attract a wide spectrum of activists is immense. Common cause could be made with environmentalists, students, open media supporters and many other potential allies, as well as workers in sectors that have so far proven extremely difficult to organize. Someone first attracted to Unifor through a community chapter could one day become a skilled union organizer. The support of community activists who have worked with one of our community chapters could be key to winning a particular strike.
Unifor, through its political action and community chapters, could demonstrate that unions are an essential element of a progressive democracy. The new union has the potential to help build a better society while at the same time building a stronger union.
Of course, as in all unions that exist in an economic system where we are bombarded with messages glorifying individual rights and individual greed, some delegates to the founding convention of Unifor may resist social unionism. Some may argue against broadening the union’s reach through community chapters. Some may want the union to limit itself to simply looking after existing members. But that road is a dead end. History has proven that is a recipe for shrinking membership and ultimate irrelevancy.
The promise of Unifor is in a rebirth of militant union activism. That’s what this delegate is going to the convention to vote for.
Gary Engler
It makes no sense we blow billions buying bombs or bailing out banks, but can’t afford to end world hunger. It makes no sense we pay to see a movie and then are forced to sit through commercials before it starts.
“It makes no sense.” I’m using these words more and more often.
The tyranny of idiot capitalism has become so ridiculous that it must be a sign the system is in crisis. The outrageous lies and distortions told to defend it have got to mean capitalism is finally obfuscating on thin ice.
At a minimum, please tell me other people have noticed the same absurdities that make me feel like smacking every sycophantic shill for the ruling class across the side of the head and screaming: “You’ve got to be kidding me! This is the best system possible? This is the height of human achievement? What do you take us for? Utterly brainwashed fools?” (And then I think it takes one to know one.)
Capitalism means freedom. Really? For the ever-greater proportion of people working in precarious part-time jobs paying peanuts? For the 70-year olds behind counters selling Big Macs or greeting Wal-Mart shoppers? For the tens of millions who have had their pensions chopped? For the garment workers toiling in life-threatening conditions in Bangladesh or Haiti or Honduras to earn $5 per day? For the millions of suburbanites who spend a quarter of their income and their waking hours on and in the vehicle that takes them to their shitty job? For the tens of thousands who have been recently bombed into “our way of life” by the greatest or one of the lesser capitalist powers? For the generations to come who will face climate change caused by profits earned spewing ever more carbon into the atmosphere?
Don’t interfere with the free market. You mean the same “free” market that has destroyed millions of good working class (what the scared-of-the-socialist-bogeyman Americans call “middle class”) jobs in order to enable a few dozen multi-millionaires to become billionaires? The market that had to be saved by bailouts to the very companies that caused its crisis, but which can’t afford good free public education for all? The market that gives us ever more processed food made from genetically modified plants fed to animals that graze in slashed-and-burned rainforests then shipped ten thousand miles but can’t provide nutritious meals of locally grown real food for every child on the planet? The market that is so efficient it requires hundred of billions of dollars to be spent on advertising to convince us to buy its products? The market that gives us plenty of $80,000 cars and $10,000 watches but can’t give billions proper sewage and water systems? The market that enforces patents owned by huge corporations, instead of the right for all to access affordable life-saving medicines? A market free from government controls, which when you really think about it means a market whose rules are made by and for the rich instead of through democratic decision-making?
Yes, we live in an absurd world. A world all about making cents, not sense.
The apostles of greed claim competition and choice are the only rights worth fighting for, as if we are all only consumers. But the vast majority of us are workers too. What about our rights at work? They are ignored, trampled upon and denied because that is what the “free” market requires.
Yes, we live in an absurd world but it can’t possibly get any worse. Can it?
It will, if we don’t fight back.
It can and it will get worse unless millions of people join together behind a common vision of an alternative to this system of one dollar, one vote called capitalism.
Once upon a time we did have a vision of an alternative economic and social system. Once upon a time a movement of hundreds of millions of ordinary people with that vision was created to build a better world and it was successful in many places, winning the universal franchise, public education, the 8-hour day, pensions, health and safety legislation, public health programs, daycare, laws against discrimination and more. Pretty much every reform that was listed in the Communist Manifesto 165 years ago.
But the unions and political parties that came out of that movement never won the most important thing: equality of power, the right of everyone to participate in running both our economic and political system. It never fought for and won something best described as economic democracy.
It left power in the hands of tiny minorities who ultimately run the world in their self-interest. And now these self-serving minorities are rolling back the reforms our mothers and fathers struggled so long and hard to win.
Yes we live in an absurd world. And it will get worse unless we come together to change it. It’s time we showed some collective sensibility.
Ernie Peshkov-Chow
Capitalism is a system that gives major shareholders and top corporate executives—one per cent or less of populations—the right to direct means of livelihood in their private interests. The system’s dominant institutions are corporations. Deemed in law to be individual persons, corporations actually combine the capital of numerous shareholders with the intention of dominating markets.
Corporations are privately owned capitalist collectives. The largest control more revenues than most governments. To maximize profits, corporations expand production and introduce labour saving machinery, cut wages, and move employment to places where labour is cheaper. A recurring result is that the income of majorities who depend on labour falls as production increases. With declining markets for consumer goods, capitalist investment turns to financial speculation. Market crashes follow. Production facilities are shut down. Unemployment worsens, more jobs are lost, wages are cut further. Individual lives are disrupted. Communities are impoverished.
To deal with disaffection, the system relies on repression, militarism, and war. Within countries, surveillance is expanded and tightened. The marginalized, the dispossessed, and the disorderly are racialized and demonized as criminals. More people are jailed for longer periods. Globally, people who actively oppose the system are demonized as terrorists; countries are bombed and occupied. Wars are highly profitable for well connected corporations and divert attention from domestic divisions. Wars also glorify the violent machismo that encourages the subjugation, abuse, and marginalization of women.
Military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya increased sales of B-52s, guided missiles, helicopter attack ships, aircraft carriers, and drones. In the invaded countries, life was made worse. Power and water plants, bridges, railways, communications systems, schools, neighborhoods and entire towns were destroyed. Tens of thousands have been killed. Millions have become refugees. Invading countries gain no tangible benefits, but for politically influential aircraft and munitions corporations like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing profits did rise substantially.
Supporters of military action abroad claim it is humanitarian intervention. In Haiti the aim of “the responsibility to protect” was to make the poorest people in the western hemisphere so desperate that they would work for even less. In 2004, the U.S., France, and Canada sent troops to remove Jean Bertrand Aristide, the elected and widely popular President. Haiti was occupied in the name of the UN Security Council. Haitian government and municipal institutions were dismantled. Public workers lost their employment. The minimum wage law was abolished; so was public transit. Education was turned over to foreign aid organizations. With no functioning public institutions, Haitians were left with no means to protect themselves from hurricanes or to rebuild after major earthquakes.
Capitalism is at the root of growing environmental crises. Private capitalist entitlement allows corporations to externalize environmental costs, to pass these on to communities, workers, future generations, and other species. Science has convincingly demonstrated that rising carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels disrupt weather patterns, melt glaciers and polar ice caps, and acidify oceans. Still, major transnational corporations continue to fund campaigns of denial.
When the supporters of capitalism concede the seriousness of carbon emissions, they propose profit-making schemes (scams) like cap and trade, or they insist that consumers are to blame and should pay. Here in BC, corporate business supported the Campbell government’s carbon tax—paid by final users of gasoline and heating oil. This ostensibly green policy fits neatly with neoconservative plans to shift the tax burden from business to working people. Meanwhile, the government increased tax-breaks and write-offs for oil and gas exploration and development.
In capitalist rhetoric, unions, public sector workers, and local communities are reactionary vested interests, opposed to change. From a human perspective, capitalists are the most socially and environmentally destructive vested interest. They shamelessly use their wealth and political influence to increase their wealth by impoverishing others and blocking changes that undermine the profits made from fossil-fueled production and trade.
The working-class alternative
The working class—everyone who depends on labour not capital for their income—has the capacity to challenge the right of capitalists to direct social labour for their private profit. The working class includes wage and salary workers and the self-employed—shopkeepers, owner operators, farmers, and self-employed professionals, all whom depend on income from their labour. Those without capitalist entitlements also include most artists, artisans, full time parents, pensioners, students, the unemployed, and those unable to work.
Being the overwhelming majority—everyone but the one per cent, 0.1 percent or 5 percent who control and live off capital—the working class frees itself only by freeing all. So long as some are exploited and oppressed, the wellbeing of everyone who depends on income from labor is threatened. A world of human equality requires the replacing of capitalist title with human entitlement, corporate ownership with social ownership, and master-servant relations with workplace democracy.
With equal human entitlement, residents of owning communities will replace shareholders as the legal beneficiaries of means of livelihood. Social labour will be motivated and directed not for private profit but for general wellbeing. When all inhabitants including people whose livelihood depends on tourism and organic agriculture, berry and mushroom pickers, scientists, educators, parents, and students as well as manufacturing and resource workers have a voice and equal vote in economic decisions, communities will limit industrial activity to the carrying capacity of environments.
With social ownership means of livelihood will no longer be bought and sold for private gain. Social ownership must be distinguished from state ownership. State ownership as it exists continues the top-down command structures of corporate capitalism. Social ownership means ownership by towns, neighborhoods, cities, regions, nations, and perhaps international communities. Social ownership means democratic and transparent planning by inhabitants for their wellbeing.
With workplace democracy workers in all occupations—machine operators, clerical workers, trades people, administrators, professionals—will have a voice and equal vote in the direction of their labour time. All occupations will be self-regulated professions. Assembly line workers will have a voice and vote in the direction of assembly-line work. Skilled trades people, clerical workers, engineers, and administrators will democratically direct their labour time. General assemblies of workers in all occupations may elect managers; owning communities will elect or appoint auditors and perhaps the directors of enterprise boards.
When capitalism is replaced with economic democracy, social labour and economies will no longer be directed in the interests of capitalist profit. When everyone is equally entitled to participate in economic decisions, communities will aim to provide acceptable employment opportunities for all available labour. No longer pressed to give priority to private profit, communities will be freed to balance industrial activity with the carrying capacity of environments. The financial costs of social services will be balanced with revenues generated in exchange. The cost of needed imports will be balanced with exports.
Capitalism is based on market exchange, but capitalism should not be confused with the latter. Markets flourished long before capitalism. Ending capitalism does not mean abolishing market exchange. The working class has an obvious interest in democratic control of means of livelihood and labour time. Majorities have an equally obvious interest in expanding social entitlements—employment at decent wages, education, food, housing, health care, child care, leisure. However, people who depend on wages and salaries cannot reasonably be expected to support the abolition of market exchange. Half and more of working people are employed in the production and distribution of goods and services for exchange.
The right of individuals and communities to freely exchange goods and services with others—subject to democratically agreed taxes and regulations—is and will remain a basic human right. The widest practical access to supplies and markets is a major source of material wellbeing. Perhaps when capitalist entitlement has become a distant memory, exchange values and market forces will be anachronisms. Until then, communities from the local to the international will aim to base trade on the exchange of equivalents in labour time.
Three twentieth century dogmas have obscured the working-class alternative. The first narrowly defined the working class as blue-collar industrial workers. The second held that the alternative to competitive capitalism is centralized state control. The third is that ending capitalism requires armed revolution to seize state power.
Factory workers have a vital role in production and in mass movements against the system, but production workers alone do not provide an alternative to capitalism. The working class is far broader. It includes blue collar, pink collar and white collar wage and salary workers—service providers, skilled trades people, clerical workers, and professionals as well as assembly line workers. When the self-employed are included, the class of people without capitalist entitlement unquestionably does everything necessary to initiate, plan, produce, transport, distribute, and sustain the production of goods and services required for human wellbeing.
In the twentieth century, top-down centralized state control was generally viewed as the alternative. The collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s adoption of capitalist policies, did embolden corporate oligarchies. From a working-class perspective the demise of what was called actually existing socialism was not entirely negative. We no longer have to answer for external alternatives that divide people. We can look for the alternative within, in the working class, in the collective capacities and human aspirations of overwhelming majorities everywhere.
The twentieth century identification of fundamental social change with armed revolution did not inspire working-class opposition to capitalism. Violence and disorder damage immediate and long-term working-class interests, undermining employment, democracy, and human rights. Young men are maimed and killed. Women and children are victimized, terrorized, and killed. An anti-capitalist working class will look not to armed struggle but to strategies and tactics that rely on the energy, spirit, and knowledge of men and women, on workplace organization, political action, and community mobilizations
Extremists among wealth-holding minorities may initiate or provoke violence to protect and advance their privileges. While people have an inherent human right to defend themselves and their interests, the working-class response is to look to mass support and to winning soldiers and police—who are themselves wage and salary workers—to the side of working-class majorities. Venezuela, Bolivia, Egypt, and Tunisia provide recent evidence that police, soldiers and officers can be won to the side of majorities.
From gross production to human wellbeing
So long as capitalism is unopposed, the working class appears dependent on capital, but it is capital that depends on labour. Capitalists as capitalists are drones; their function is to appropriate values produced by others. Every activity required for human wellbeing is now done by the working class—including the self-employed, as well as wage and salary workers. What the working class lacks is the understanding that capitalism is a house of paper entitlements that rests on the acquiescence of majorities.
Ideally, people who depend on labour for their livelihood would overwhelmingly refuse to accept rule by, and in, the narrow interests of a wealthy minority. Everyone would continue doing the work they now do, but instead of submitting to master-servant relations, people in all occupations—production, transportation, distribution, and sales people, professionals, managers, day care workers, service providers, teachers, accountants, nurses, and doctors—would democratically direct their labour time. Instead of working for the profit of shareholders, they would work in the interests of their communities.
Realistically, so long as capital is dominant substantial numbers will believe that their relative wellbeing and status depend on capitalism. Many will ignore capitalist privilege and see the enemy as the state, big government, foreign countries, unions, the poor, minorities, immigrants, liberals, Ivy League elites, feminists, older white men, communists, anarchists, criminals, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus.
Seeing human equality, cooperation, and democracy as a realistic alternative will encourage the disaffected to look to human solidarity, to respect diversity and each other. It will deepen opposition to a system that gives the interests of wealthy minorities priority over human and environmental wellbeing. It will encourage community mobilizations, workplace organization, and political action for gains and reforms that weaken capitalist title and strengthen human entitlement. As such gains are made, more men and women will be inspired to mobilize against the system.
In the second half of the twentieth century, a time of virulent anti-communism, Keynesian reforms that improved living conditions did dampen opposition to capitalism. When motivated by visions of economic democracy, movements for reforms that improve the quality of life can convince more people that opposition to capitalism is practical.
The exact issues that will inspire mass mobilization against the system cannot be predicted. We can start by campaigning for steeply graduated income taxes. Rates of 75 per cent or higher on incomes over $250,000 a year could increase government revenues by an equivalent of five per cent or more of gross national income. The revenues raised would eliminate government deficits and provide needed funding for social services, health care, education, public transit, and renewal of needed public infrastructure. Higher wealth and inheritance taxes can be similarly beneficial. Tobin taxes on financial transactions and the re-regulation of international currency and interest rates would reduce the negative impact of financial speculation and raise more public revenues. Increasing tariffs enough to encourage domestic production would further increase government revenues and weaken the power of transnational capital over markets.
Supporters of the system claim that attempts to increase taxes on the rich inevitably backfire because capital will move elsewhere. In fact, capitalists invest where it is profitable. Capital does move in response to marginal changes in profitability, but wherever we are, we are not alone. Raising taxes on capital can inspire similar movements elsewhere, potentially limiting the threat of capital flight and weakening the power of capital to play regions and countries against others for their private benefit.
Public ownership of banks would direct savings away from speculative manias to socially useful investments. Reversing privatizations, renewing public ownership of utilities, transportation and communications systems, and natural resources could methodically weaken the power of capital and strengthen democratic control of means of livelihood. Reforming political campaign finance rules, lobbying regulations, electoral laws would reduce the control capital now has over political agendas.
Local communities can take initiatives to set up cooperatives and community owned financial institutions, social housing, electrical power and communications utilities. Public support for local food production can make people less dependent on the vagaries of capitalist markets. Environmental action can help ensure a better human future. Local, national, and international mobilizations can help reduce dependence on fossil fuel and replace automobiles with public transit and bicycles. Cities can be reconfigured so that walking once again is a pleasant, healthy mode of daily transportation.
Community and workplace mobilizations in solidarity with First Nations, racialized minorities, the marginalized, women, and immigrants will build human bonds and help expose the mean-spirited divisiveness of wealth-holders’ privilege. Support for policies that are intended to reduce disparities increase global human cooperation. These include the right of people to democratically direct their domestic markets as well as international funding with no strings attached for education, housing, health care, and infrastructure. Development should be directed not by foreign agencies but people themselves. The aim is to help provide people with capacity to help themselves.
The capacity of capitalists to use violence against working-class gains can be reduced. Vocally supporting the work police do in protecting persons and property, while exposing covert politically motivated policing, demanding public accountability of the criminal justice system, and mobilizing against police assaults on opponents of the system can help win police to the side of the people. Supporting soldiers in the sacrifices they make while opposing militarism and war can expose capitalist profiteering at the expense of soldiers as well as of people abroad.
Unions will have critical roles in movements against capitalism. Workers not represented by unions have no means to formulate their workplace interests independent of capitalists. Unions were organizing centres of campaigns for freedom of assembly, association, speech, and the press, as well as the right to vote for men and women. Unions are largely responsible for the wages and working conditions that allow capitalism to claim it provides rising living standards. Now in a time when capitalist interests are eroding collective bargaining rights, unions have been preoccupied with conserving past gains. Still unions have provided critical support for First Nations, racialized minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and immigrants.
Revived opposition to capitalism may begin with the unemployed, marginalized, dispossessed minorities, immigrants, or students. Wherever it begins, rising opposition to capitalism will encourage workers already organized for collective bargaining to join in solidarity. As opposition to capitalism grows, more wage and salary workers will demand collective bargaining rights. Revived unionism will convince more people that a working-class alternative is practical.
Mass protests over the past few years in Brazil, Egypt, Tunisia, Wisconsin, Greece, and Israel show that people will rally against repression, privatizations, public sector layoffs, cuts to social programs, rising food costs and the high cost of for-profit housing. Immediate results may be disappointing, but as people come to see that they are not alone in opposition to a system directed by and for super-wealthy minorities, mass protests can turn into general strikes and workplace occupations as well as into electoral gains for democracy and equality.
Al Engler
Most political parties, central banks and the corporate media insist that public debt is the most pressing problem facing governments. Meanwhile, real wages in the U.S., UK and Canada, and much of the EU continue to fall. Disparities widen. Rates of chronic unemployment are rising. Unemployment levels for young people are at historic highs, over fifty per cent in Greece, Spain and Portugal. But capitalists—whose income comes from profits, dividends, interest, rent and capital gains—are preoccupied with public debt.
For centuries, public debt has been a driver of capitalist growth. By increasing financial reserves, government bonds and treasury bills add to the credit available to business. Most of the interest on public debt is paid to financial institutions and wealthy individuals. Capitalists clearly benefited from the trillions in the additions to public debt to bailout financial institutions after the 2007-08 sub-prime mortgage crash.
For capitalists the only real problem with public debt is that it might not be repaid. In a time of declining government revenues, creditors have reason to worry. But additional revenues could be raised with little damage to most markets by restoring taxes on corporations and top incomes to earlier levels. This is not happening because it would be contrary to entrenched supply-side policies that have dominated political agendas for more than thirty years.
In the 1970s neo-conservatives, liberally funded by the super rich, began to stridently demand an end to Keynesian demand-side policies. They claimed that rising real wages and expanding social entitlements were lowering the income of capital, reducing the supply of funds for investment, leading to stagnation and inflation. They demanded that governments cut spending on social services, weaken unions, reduce regulations on business, and leave economic priorities to the marketplace.
The Keynesian period that preceded the neo-conservative reaction was no utopia. It was a time of paranoid anti-Communism, institutionalized racism, discrimination against women, homophobia, and genocidal imperialist wars. But in many countries laws were passed to make it easier for unions to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Common people gained rights to public pensions, unemployment insurance, family allowances and post-secondary education. Governments made major investments in transportation infrastructure, electrical utilities, schools and hospitals. Capital movements, currency values and interest rates were regulated. International trade was encouraged, but reciprocal tariffs were kept high enough to protect domestic production for domestic markets.
To pay down heavy war debts and to increase spending on social services and public infrastructure, taxes on corporate income were 50 per cent and higher; taxes on top personal incomes were 70 and 90 percent. Although the share of total income appropriated by the richest two percent fell during Keynesian times, corporate investment rose steadily, as did markets and real wages.
The first major neo-conservative victories were the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the UK in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the US in 1980. Taxes on capitalist income and corporations were cut. So were social programs. Regulations on corporations were eased and eliminated. Laws were changed to make it more difficult for unions to organize and bargain successfully. Neo-conservatives claimed that increasing the after-tax income of the rich and freeing corporations to maximize profits would increase the supply of funds for investment. They said employment would increase, as would the supply of goods and services.
The top two per cent of income earners did double their share of total income to twenty percent. However, the rate of investment did not increase. Real wages declined. Chronic unemployment increased. Growth in markets for consumer goods slowed.
Supply-side policies—now more often called neo-liberalism or the Washington consensus—have a fundamental flaw. Individual capitalist investment has little impact on real economies. Most private investment in machinery, equipment, buildings, land, resources, and on research and development comes out of depreciation and depletion allowances and other pre-tax corporate revenues.
In a recent study commissioned by the UK government, prominent economist John Kay reported that the total capital raised by British companies in equity markets is actually negative. He concluded that financial markets serve the narrow interests of financial institutions and wealthy investors who can make quick profits by buying and selling shares, taking control of companies and stripping assets. “In a paradoxical way, the function of equity markets today is not to enable savers to put money into companies. It’s to enable them to get it out.”
When capitalists do invest in real means of livelihood, they look to places where labor is cheaper. As more jobs move abroad, overall wage income falls, further weakening markets. Private domestic investment focuses on speculation in real estate, high tech start-ups, futures markets, derivatives, and to mergers, acquisitions and takeovers. Few of these investments add anything to real means of livelihood. In casino capitalism, excess capital drives up share prices, overvaluing assets. Financial booms are followed by busts, capital evaporates, credit dries up, real enterprises go bankrupt, more people lose employment.
Instead of the frugal savers in Adam Smith’s free market, today’s capitalists are self-indulgent gamblers. They spend extravagantly on lavish mansions, luxury condos, private jets and yachts. They have more than enough left over to fund the political campaigns and lobbying that give them effective control of political agendas.
Letting the market decide may sound benign. In practice it means giving a wealthy minority–major shareholders and top corporate executives—free rein to direct economies for their private short-term profit. Meanwhile, tax cuts for corporations and the super rich have reduced the capacity of governments to limit the damage done by capitalist self-interest. In Canada, in the last decade, total government revenues have fallen from 43 percent of GDP to less than 38 percent.
When current governments do intervene they do so to defend capitalist interests. Public services are frozen and cut, public employment is reduced. Yes, austerity policies, by assuring creditors that they will be paid, help keep capital markets booming, but cuts to employment and consumer income weaken most other markets, discouraging investment in real means of livelihood, increasing unemployment and poverty. As disparities within and among countries widen, capitalist minorities turn to more internal repression, more surveillance, more public spending on weapons of mass destruction and foreign military intervention.
Al Engler
For forty years people have been bombarded with claims that economic well being depends on private capital not on governments. Public utilities and services have been privatized. Regulations on corporations have been weakened. Taxes paid by corporations and the top income brackets have been slashed. Capital has been freed to move jobs from higher wage to lower wage countries.
Capitalist minorities — major shareholders and top corporate executives, two percent and less of populations — have increased their share of total income from ten percent to twenty percent. Capitalists have increased funds for private investment, but roads, bridges, rail lines, sewage and water systems have been allowed to deteriorate. Capitalists also have more money to finance election campaigns, to lobby and manipulate political agendas. Public spending on schools, hospitals, medical care and other social services has fallen behind needs. Chronic unemployment has risen. More people must get by on part-time work. Unemployment levels for young people are 25 percent, 50 percent and higher.
For immense majorities who depend on income from labor and social services, the problem is not too much government; it is too much money and power in the hands of corporations and the super-rich.
Governments should be criticized for disregarding the well being of majorities. Corruption, secrecy and duplicity should be condemned. But what in government is corruption in corporations is proprietary right. Corporations legally direct resources and social labor behind closed doors for the profits of shareholders. To make it seem that this is a matter of private rights, capitalist law deems corporations to be individuals. Corporations are actually the system’s dominant institutions. The largest transnational corporations have more revenues than most governments.
Corporations are not the competitive individuals of free market theory. They dominate markets. They patent products, technologies, and processes. They buy up the most profitable sources of supply, control marketing networks, and spend millions on advertising to tie consumers to existing brands. Whenever possible, they introduce technologies that reduce employment. They outsource wage and salary work. The fewer people employed, the less paid for labor, the more profits for shareholders, the more money for executive bonuses.
As capital’s share of total income rises, the share going to labor and the needy falls. As most markets decline, capitalists turn to speculation, betting on price changes in real estate, futures or derivatives. Casino capitalism adds nothing to real means of livelihood; winners merely gain at the expense of losers. Financial bubbles are followed by crashes. As more businesses fail, capitalists hold on to what they can by demanding that debtors be punished for the sins of creditors. Austerity leads to further declines in working-class income and markets.
Governments should be opposed for supporting policies that favor capitalist minorities and acting as the agencies of militarism, wars and repression. Minority privilege rests on the force of arms. Some capitalists promote war because they believe that military action can give them access to new resources and markets. Others profit from the purchase of drones, missiles, airplanes, fuel, and the provisioning of armed forces.
Edward Snowden exposed government secrets. He also exposed the central role private corporations have in surveillance and repression. His employer, Booz Allen Hamilton is a defense, security and surveillance contractor that has 26,000 employees and revenues of $5 billion, 99 percent from the U.S. government. Just as the privatization of prisons has led to growth in numbers jailed and to the use of penal labor for private profit, the privatization of surveillance can be expected to lead to more intrusive surveillance. The internet, once hailed for democratizing information, is already a tool of surveillance for private profit.
The most ominous consequence of capitalism is global warming. Because existing profits depend on cheap energy, capitalists refuse to believe that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change. Their remarkable wealth has made them so smugly self-assured that they have convinced themselves that if they deny the obvious global temperatures will not rise; ice caps will not melt; oceans will not become more acidic; extreme weather events will not become more frequent.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, corporate capitalism increases investments in tar sands and fracking, while cutting investments in solar, wind, tidal, and biothermal energy. They invest little in alternative nuclear power technologies that could eliminate nuclear waste and the threat of meltdowns. Corporate interests that concede the threat of global warming, promote new profitable uses for industrial waste. They propose reducing heat from the sun by blasting reflective chemicals into the atmosphere, and absorbing more carbon by dumping iron filings into the ocean and plowing “biochar” — the ashes of incinerated garbage — into soils.
If governments are to act in the immediate and long-term interests of humankind, the power of capitalist minorities must be reduced; democratic rights must expand. Taxes paid by corporations and the super rich must be raised at least to 1950s levels. Privatizations should be reversed, public ownership expanded. Wherever practical, utilities and public services should be directed by local communities. Allowing those with the most shares to have the most votes must be replaced with one person one vote. People everywhere must have a right to a voice and equal vote in directing their communities’ economic activity. Workers in all occupations must have the right to democratically direct their social labor time.
Al Engler
It makes perfect sense that capitalists would promote the idea that workers are not capable of running the world. For the same reason capitalists and their supporters claim a few rich people “own” the collective means of production: These are ways to justify minority rule. In effect, the one per cent minority is telling the 99% majority: “Our money gives us the power to run the world and you’re too stupid to do anything about it.”
Bullshit of course, but there’s a question to answer before rebutting these two piles of propaganda poop: Why would workers want to run the world?
And this is not just some rhetorical question. It is a summing up of dozens of questions and statements that I hear everyday from people around me, all workers who should know better. Here are a few:
“Let the managers manage — it’s their right.”
“The world is so messed up, it’s too late to do anything about it, anyway.”
“We’d fuck it up.”
“There’s no collective solution, the best we can do is look after ourselves.”
“My friends and family, that’s all I care about.”
“I’m not here for a long time, just a good time.”
“Go back to the land.”
“I can barely look after myself, let alone run the world.”
“It sounds good, but it will turn out bad. It always does.”
In other words, why even consider the project of the vast majority of people, who are workers, getting together and trying to make a better world?
The easiest answer is: We’re screwed if we don’t. The one percent who currently rules the world is doing what small ruling classes have done throughout history — run the economic and political system in their self-interest. If they get rich from war, there will be war. If they get to choose between health care for all or more profits for themselves, they’ll choose profit. If lots of money is to be made by pouring ever more carbon into the atmosphere, global warming will get worse and worse.
Workers must take power away from the greedy one percent and run the world in the interests of all because if we don’t things will keep getting worse.
And workers, organized together, are the only people with the potential power to create a democratic economy. If we don’t do it no one will, because only workers have the possibility of taking over the factories, offices, warehouses, railways, ships, stores and other places of work that make up our economy. Only workers acting together can create an economic democracy.
“Is that the best you can come up, a negative reason?” some might ask.
But in fact there’s lot of positive reasons. I can think of a few right off the top of my head:
Changing the world to make it a better place will be fun. All those who participate will have the time of their lives.
Your grandchildren and their grandchildren will love you for doing it.
It is the right thing to do.
Imagine a world where everyone was actually given an opportunity to develop all their potential and be the best person they could be. Trying to achieve a world like that is a very good thing.
I’m sure others can come up with a lot more positive reasons why workers should want to change the world.
Think of these reasons as the tools we need to build the foundation of a movement.
You’ve got to start someplace. A trip to a new world begins with a single step.
Ernie Peshkov-Chow
It makes perfect sense that capitalists would push the idea that workers are not capable of running the world. For the same reason capitalists and their supporters claim a few rich people “own” the collective means of production: These are ways to justify minority rule. In effect, the one per cent minority is telling the 99% majority: “Our money gives us the power to run the world and you’re too stupid to do anything about it.”
Bullshit of course, but there’s a question to answer before rebutting these two piles of propaganda poop: Why would workers want to run the world?
And this is not just some rhetorical question. It is a summing up of dozens of questions and statements that I hear everyday from people around me, all workers who should know better. Here are a few:
“Let the managers manage — it’s too much of a headache.”
“The world is so messed up, it’s too late to do anything about it, anyway.”
“We’d fuck it up.”
“There’s no collective solution, the best we can do is look after ourselves.”
“My friends and family, that’s all I care about.”
“I’m not here for a long time, just a good time.”
“Go back to the land.”
“I can barely look after myself, let alone run the world.”
“It sounds good, but it will turn out bad. It always does.”
In other words, why even consider the project of the vast majority of people, who are workers, getting together and trying to make a better world?
The easiest answer is: We’re screwed if we don’t. The one percent that currently rules the world is doing what small ruling classes have done throughout history — run their world in their self-interest. If they get rich from war, there will be war. If they get to choose between health care for all or more profits for themselves, they’ll choose profit. If lots of money is to be made by pouring ever more carbon into the atmosphere and capitalists are running the world, global warming will get worse and worse.
Workers must take power away from the greedy one percent and run the world in the interests of all because if we don’t things will keep getting worse.
And workers, organized together, are the only people with the potential power to create a democratic economy, which is the only way of taking power away from the ruling minority. If we don’t do it no one will.
“Is that the best you can come up, a negative reason?” some might ask.
But in fact there’s lot of positive reasons. I can think of a few right off the top of my head:
Changing the world to make it a better place will be fun. All those who participate will have the time of their lives.
Your grandchildren and their grandchildren will love you for doing it.
It is the right thing to do.
Imagine a world where everyone was actually given an opportunity to develop all their potential and be the best person they could be. That would be good, wouldn’t it? Trying to achieve a world like that is a very good thing.
I’m sure others can come up with a lot more positive reasons why workers should want to change the world.
Think of these reasons as the tools we need to build a movement.
You’ve got to start someplace.
Ernie Peshkov-Chow
New Commune-ist Manifesto 
The case for much higher taxes on the rich
10 SepHigh government deficits are being used to justify cuts to public employment and social programs. It is not a surprise that transnational finance, the corporate media and right-wing political parties demand that returns on investments be given priority over employment, workers’ income, and the well-being of the marginalized. Having aggressively supported cuts to business and income taxes, they have reason to worry about the real returns on government bonds.
It is also not a surprise that unions and students in Europe have mobilized millions against these cuts. Unions, public sector workers, pensioners, immigrants and the poor are not to blame. Government deficits are a direct result of tax cuts, capitalist speculation, the 2008 financial crash, government bailouts, and the resulting loss of employment, income and government revenues.
If public deficits were the real problem—not just a pretext—military spending particularly in the U.S. would be drastically cut. Taxes would be raised. Of course, tax increases have consequences. Higher sales and value-added taxes reduce consumer purchasing power, further weakening markets in times of recession. Taxes on enterprise revenues can reduce expenditures for plant and equipment and lead to the failure of more businesses.
Steeply graduated income taxes would upset the super-rich but are otherwise benign. Taxing income over $200,000 a year at rates of 75 per cent, and over $500,000 at 90 per cent would substantially increase government revenues without reducing markets for most goods and services. Taxing profits on the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, real estate, and currencies could raise additional revenues. International agreement to raise tariffs to 15 to 25 per cent from the current average of five to ten per cent would raise more. Although the profits of transnational corporations would be squeezed, the resulting growth in local production for local consumption would expand employment, income, and public revenues everywhere.
Increasing taxes on capitalist income is anathema to the supply-side economists who have dominated government policy for thirty years. They claim that increasing taxes on the wealthy reduces the supply of funds available for private investment, causing job loss, reduced real incomes, and economic decline. Supply-side economics was a wealth-holders’ reaction to Keynesian demand-side policies.
The Keynesian period—from World War II through the 1970s—had been a response to destructive twentieth century wars, financial crashes, prolonged economic declines, and rising support for militant unionism, socialism, and communism. To counter growing opposition to capitalism, to stimulate consumer demand and to revive opportunities for profitable investments, governments increased spending on pensions, unemployment insurance, education, healthcare and income support. Laws were changed to make it easier for unions to organize and to bargain collectively.
Much of the cost of stimulating demand was covered by steeply graduated income taxes. In Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. the highest incomes were taxed at marginal rates up to 90 per cent during the war and after. Although lowered in the 1960s, income taxes remained steeply graduated through the 1970s. The share of total income going to capital as profits, dividends, interest payments, and rent did decline. Nonetheless, investments in machinery, equipment, buildings, infrastructure (bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, public transit), and housing stock rose steadily.
By the 1970s many of the very rich and corporate oligarchs had concluded that the welfare state was not in their interests. Unions were in decline. Communism was clearly not outperforming capitalism economically or militarily. At the end of the decade, neoconservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were winning political office claiming that Keynesian policies had increased demand at the expense of the supply of capital for investments. The result, they said, was not growth, but inflation and stagnation.
In fact, the Keynesian period was a time of steady, impressive growth in investment and consumer income. Inflation rates did reach double digits in the 1970s. Neoconservatives blamed this on rising social spending and government deficits. A more obvious explanation was the combination of rising oil prices and massive inflows of capital from abroad. Oil prices had risen from under $3 to over $30 a barrel, increasing the price of nearly all goods and services. Suddenly awash in revenues, the rulers of oil exporting countries invested billions in the U.S., U.K, Europe and Canada. Governments that were already cutting taxes paid by the rich and accumulating deficits, responded by borrowing more. U.S. government decisions to finance war in Indochina with borrowed money, not tax increases, compounded the problem.
In the 1980s, after supply-side policies became the economic orthodoxy, taxes on corporations and upper incomes were methodically lowered. Industries were deregulated. Laws were changed to make it more difficult for unions to organize and to engage in effective collective bargaining. Public utilities and services were privatized.
The rich did get richer—the super-rich substantially richer—but economies did not flourish as supply-siders had predicted. The quality of public services declined. Social infrastructure was allowed to decay. Employment in manufacturing and service industries fell. The real income of wage and salary workers stopped growing. Markets for consumer goods stagnated.
Supply-side theorists ignored the evidence. Instead, they turned phrases from Adam Smith into a mantra. More income for capitalists, they intoned, meant more savings, more investment, more economic growth. But Smith was not talking of twentieth century corporate oligarchs when he equated capitalist income with savings and investment. He was describing a middle class of prosperous farmers, shopkeepers, and merchants, whose frugality he contrasted with the aristocracy’s fondness for luxury. The middle class, he said, turned their surplus income into savings for investment in the future; aristocrats spent and borrowed for their current pleasure.
Today’s super-rich are more like eighteenth-century aristocrats than the middle classes of Smith’s day. They are mega and giga-consumers who transform revenues from productive assets and social labour into personal wealth—into mansions, yachts, beachfront condos, and winter retreats. As a class, they are obsessed with maximizing returns on their wealth, but they have little interest in productive investment. For them, innovation means new more profitable investment instruments: futures, derivatives, dubious mortgages packaged as collatoralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps (bankruptcy insurance).
Even when pyramid scams and outright fraud are not involved, nothing is added to means of livelihood when one capitalist buys and another sells stocks. Financial entitlements are merely shuffled from one to another. When the rich do invest in actual plant and equipment this is likely to be abroad where labour is cheaper and profits are higher.
The economic argument
Steeply graduated income taxes would make public debt manageable. Unlike taxes on consumption, taxes on the highest incomes would not dampen markets for consumer goods. Additional public revenues could be used to improve education, healthcare, social housing, income support, public transit. As employment and markets expand, enterprises would be encouraged to invest more.
Undistributed corporate profits are the main source of investment in research, development, plant, and equipment. By discouraging the distribution of profits as dividends, executive salaries, and bonuses, confiscatory tax rates on the highest incomes would give enterprises more reason to retain earnings, increasing the funds available for investment in real means of livelihood.
With far higher taxes on capitalist income, the super-rich will have to make do with less sumptuous homes, fewer and less luxurious automobiles, yachts, and vacation spots. For everyone else, the cost of keeping up with the Joneses will be less. People in all income groups are likely to save more, making more funds available for investment in housing and local enterprises.
The democratic argument
Capitalism claims to be a system of individual opportunities. Increasing the revenues for education, healthcare, pensions, and income-support would expand opportunities. Steeply graduated income taxes would transfer control of social surpluses from a corporate oligarchy to elected national, regional, and local governments.
Can governments and elected representatives be trusted to act in the common interest? With steeply graduated income tax, a small self-serving minority would have less money to influence legislation and corrupt politicians. Billionaires, like the Koch brothers—two of the wealthiest men in the U.S. who have bankrolled the U.S. Tea Party—would have less spare cash to dominate and manipulate political agendas in their narrow class interests.
Steeply graduated income taxes alone would not end capitalist entitlement, but as elected governments gain more revenues to expand social entitlements and public employment, people will demand to have a voice in economic decisions. The right of wealth-holding minorities to impose their immediate interests will be replaced with the transparent, democratic right of people to direct economic life in the common interest, in the interests of human and environmental well-being.
The environmental argument
The wealthiest one per cent presently claim twenty per cent and more of total income. If their share were reduced to five per cent, extravagant consumption and the accompanying waste of resources would be greatly reduced.
Governments would have the funds needed to replace dependence on private automobiles with fast, accessible public transportation. Federal, regional, and local governments could be provided with the funds to construct public heating and cooling systems that require less fossil fuels. Investments could be made in local agriculture for local markets. Environmental protection agencies could employ enough inspectors to investigate complaints and to act against corporate damage to ecosystems.
As control of social surpluses passes from the hands of wealth-holding minorities to elected governments, people will mobilize to demand that national, regional, and local communities provide more employment and goods and services as human rights. Fewer people will come to depend on the profitability of capital in general and of transnational corporations in particular. More people will be free to oppose environmentally destructive industrial activity.
As communities replace private corporations as the institutions making economic decisions, industrial and service workers, professionals, the retired, homemakers, students, farmers, mushroom pickers, loggers, and ecologists will all have the right to a voice and equal vote. The interests of major shareholders and top corporate executives will no longer take precedence over the income and employment of common people, or over the carrying capacity of environments.
Al Engler
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Tags: capitalism, economic democracy, socialism, unions