Haymarket Books

One aspect that has remained nearly constant is the class structure of production. By that I mean the internal organization of enterprises. Under capitalism, a mass of workers produce by their labor more than they get back as wages and salaries. In the language of economics, the value added by workers in production exceeds the value paid to those workers for the work they do. The difference between the value added by workers and the value paid to workers is what Karl Marx called surplus.

Overcoming the crises that are endemic to capitalism requires changing more than the form of capitalism. It requires changing the internal organization of capitalist production itself.

The Major Problems of Private Capitalisms

The functioning of capitalist economies depends crucially on the decisions made by a relatively small number of capitalists. In the typical larger corporations that prevail in the United States and many other capitalist economies, boards of directors selected by the enterprise’s major shareholders are the decision makers. Usually composed of nine to twenty individuals, these boards are very small collectives of capitalists. They make the basic decisions of what to produce (which goods and services), how to produce (what technologies and inputs to utilize), and where to produce (what geographic locations to occupy for producing and distributing their outputs). These decisions are part of what directing the enterprise means.

How capitalists direct enterprises plays a major role in shaping capitalist societies. For example, to whom and for what purposes capitalists distribute the surplus influences the culture and politics, as well as the economics, of capitalist societies. If capitalists are concerned about matters of crime and security, they can and will distribute large portions of the surplus to preventing crime, prosecuting those they deem criminals, and obtaining security.

Capitalists define goals such as maximizing profits and achieving high rates of growth or larger market shares, and then direct their enterprises accordingly. Capitalists routinely pursue those goals, often at the expense of their workers. For example, they fire workers and replace them with machines, or they impose a technology that exposes workers to health and environmental risks but increases profits, or they relocate production out of the country to exploit cheaper labor. However, if enterprises were organized differently—if workers collectively directed enterprises (and thus excluded capitalists)—the problems of enterprises would be solved in different ways, with different social consequences.

when capitalists, for example, try to squeeze more work out of employees while trying to pay them less, replace workers with machines, relocate production to low-wage areas, risk their workers’ health with cheap but toxic inputs, and so on—those are behaviors prompted in them by the realities of the system within which they work and for which they are rewarded and praised. Many capitalists do these things without being greedy or evil. When capitalists do display greed or other character flaws, those flaws are less causes than results of a system that requires certain actions by capitalists who want to survive and prosper.

In fact, we must question the very possibility of genuine democracy in a society in which capitalism is the basic economic system. A functioning democracy would require that all people be provided with the time, information, counsel, and other supports needed to participate effectively in decision-making in the workplace and at the local, regional, and national levels of their residential communities.

In the decades since the 1970s, stagnant real wages, rising hours of paid labor performed per person and per household, and rising levels of household debt all combined to leave working families with less time and energy to devote to politics—or indeed to social activities and organizations in general.* Working-class participation in politics, already limited before the 1970s, shrank very significantly during the neoliberal period.

What prevents another New Deal–type trickle-up economic policy from being adopted now is a political system compromised by its dependence on money drawn predominantly from certain social groups. Not surprisingly, those groups insist on trickle-down economics. The government helps them first, foremost, and overwhelmingly. The rest of the economy and society then wait to see what, if anything, actually trickles down.

The 99 percent might turn to politics to negate the economic gains of the 1 percent. Thus it became—and remains—more important than ever for the 1 percent to use their money to shape and control politics.