A miner is walking
home after a long hard day down the pit. Being weary, he takes a short cut across
a field.
Soon enough, he is
approached by the land-owner. “You are trespassing on private land, this land
belongs to me.”
The miner responds,
“So, how did you come by all this land?”
“My ancestors won it in battle,” proudly says
the land-owner.
“Okay, get your jacket off” replies the miner,
“and I’ll fight you for it right now!”
Despite a number of trends indicating improved economic
circumstances, poverty remains deeply entrenched and pervasive. If poverty
persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. For the large majority of
black families, the ghettos of the civil rights era have been passed on from
parents to children, with little change. No other advanced nation tolerates the
depth of deprivation allowed in the United States. Among too many poor and minority
Americans, voting and choosing elected officials just isn't viewed as essential
to their lives. Over time, while assistance to the poor has increased, families
deemed as "undeserving" have experienced a decrease in assistance. But
these crude distinctions between the "deserving" and
"undeserving" poor are unworthy of true progressives.
1.5 million households, including 3 million children, living
on no more than $2 a day in 2011 for seven months or more -- the measure used
to determine poverty in the underdeveloped world. This number has increased by
almost two and a half times since 1996.
The most recent poverty data for 2014 show that 47 million Americans
(14.8 percent of the total population) were living in poverty -- on less than
$24,000 for a two-parent family with two children. Even more distressing is
that 21 million Americans (6.6 percent of the total population) were living in
deep poverty -- less than 50 percent of the official poverty level or $12,000
for a family of four. Since 2007, when the recession began, the number of
Americans living in deep poverty has increased by over 5 million people, while
over 9 million more people are living in official poverty.
A recent Pew analysis shows that hollowing to be very real:
The share of the adult population living in middle-income households (defined
as having an annual household income between $42,000 and $126,000 in 2014
dollars for a three-person household) declined from 61 percent in 1971 to
slightly less than 50 percent in 2015.
At the lower end of the income scale, the proportion of
adults living in households with the lowest incomes grew from 16 percent in
1971 to 20 percent in 2015. (A three-person household in the lowest-income tier
had an income of $31,402 or less in 2015.) At the upper end of the income
spectrum, the share of adults in the highest-income tier reached 9 percent in
2015, up from 4 percent in 1971. (A three-person household in the
highest-income tier had an income of $188,412 or more in 2015.)
Notwithstanding the increase in the percentage of people in
the lowest income group, their overall share of aggregate income actually
declined slightly over the 44-year period, dropping from 10 percent in 1970 to
9 percent in 2014. By contrast, the share of aggregate income held by
high-income households at the upper extreme of the income spectrum escalated
from 29 percent in 1970 to 49 percent in 2014! This expansion was at the
expense of both the lower class and the middle class. The latter's share of
aggregate income dropped precipitously, falling from a 62 percent share in 1970
to just 43 percent in 2014.
The median net worth of families in the lower-income tier
has decreased from $11,544 in 1983 to just $9,465 in 2013 (measured in 2014
dollars). The median net worth of the upper-income tier, however, more than
doubled during the same period, soaring from $323,402 in 1983 to $650,074 in
2013. The median net worth for the middle-income tier of families has risen
slightly, increasing from $95,879 in 1983 to $98,057 in 2013.
The richest, most exceptional country on planet earth cannot
admit to have so many poor. "The middle class" is not really a class,
it is a demographic. It is a measure of income. It is a self-serving term for
politicians because anyone who can identify as middle class in any given year,
has an interest is maintaining or enlarging the status quo - which is mission
critical for bourgeois servants of Wall Street, as exemplified by Hillary
Clinton. What the American 99% need is an understanding of genuine class
politics. The vast majority of us are proletarian, working class people,
whether or not we are making enough money at the moment to fit into the
bourgeois "middle class "demographic - so many of us aren't who once
were.
There is a way out: Revolutionary Economics. We must realize
that humanity is one family and actually live so as to manifest that oneness.
Cooperation, not competition is the way. Become motivated to replace that
shameful capitalist economic system with one genuinely under democratic
control. When Marx talked about “class dictatorship” so long ago, what people
seem to miss, and that needs to be driven home once again, is that there is a
ruling class, and this class operates according to certain imperatives. Simply
put, and on one level it is just this simple, for pretty much the whole world,
capital decides. To bring in a little complexity: 1) In other words, politicians or presidents don’t decide, capital,
as a social process rooted in socialized production and reproduction (and,
sure, its accumulated wealth and power), decides, the basic social decisions in
a capitalist society are made by what is necessary for this process to continue
to advance; again, to simplify, the accumulation of profit decides; 2) This is the case unless there is some
truly countervailing force such as a vigorous class struggle And at this point in
time that is pretty much nothing.
The fact is that the president serves at the pleasure of the
U.S. ruling class. Given that no one who has actually studied the question of
socialism thinks of Bernie Sanders as a “real socialist,” or perhaps, at best,
it might be conceded that he is a “socialist” of the “Swedish” sort where
people work in relatively good conditions for good wages, with all kinds of
nice perks such as day-care and good health insurance, while building fighter
jets that will be used to drop cluster bombs on Palestinians; most people don’t
seem to realize that even this sort of “Swedish socialism” hasn’t existed in Sweden
for some time now and is now being increasingly eroded even more. If by some
almost unimaginable set of circumstances he were to become president, would
this actually be good or bad for “real socialism”? Regarding whatever there is
of “socialism” in Bernie Sanders’ program, it is interesting that he uses the
term “political revolution.” What genuine socialists aspire to create is a “social
revolution”, not just redistribution of wealth from the wealthy and
super-wealthy by using higher tax-rates. Clearly the inequality in the United
States has reached obscene proportions, just as the inequality in the world has
been beyond obscene more or less forever, but it becomes a question of global
social relations. There can be “[democratic] socialism in one country”. There
is a worldwide dimension to a socialist revolution, the working class forms a
single, international class that transcends nation-states, that must ultimately
transform the world in a liberatory way. So, the question becomes, what good is
accomplished by advancing that sort of socialism advocated by Sanders?
The problem is not the “billionaire class,” but instead the ownership of the means of production by the capitalist
ruling class. And the problem is not “greed,” but instead the way the
capitalist system works, to channel all productive efforts into the creation of
surplus value, called “profit” by capitalists. One of Marx’s great discoveries
is that this process is guided by the social relations (including the property
relations) that are the heart of capital, and not by the subjective desires,
avaricious or otherwise, of individual capitalists. In other words, the problem
is capitalism, not greed. The solution is to create a real break with
capitalism. Marx demonstrated that the subjectivities of capitalists–and
everyone else–are rooted in social processes, though nothing deterministic can
be said about this. Perhaps some capitalists are “nice, caring people,” or
whatever. On the other hand, in what they participate in, capitalists are
indeed bad people to a one, so let it not go without saying. They need to be
dealt with, as part of breaking with capitalism.
Even if Sanders is sincere he is not just up against “greedy
billionaires,” he is up against the compulsion of the U.S. capitalist ruling
class to compete in a vast global market with no ethical concerns whatsoever, other
than profit accumulation “by any means necessary.” In attempting to extend the
welfare state with relatively mild reforms, or in the case of at least trying
to make corporations and capitalists simply pay taxes at the low rate they are
already charged, the odds are stacked against Sanders. America is divided into
two distinct and opposing camps, the one side having little to say for itself
other than that it owns everything and that it will use every means in its
disposal to hold on to the ownership of everything. On the other side we can
only hope that people will begin to question and challenge this “ownership,”
and how it could conceivably be that a relative handful of people own
everything and exert tremendous control over the lives of billions. The job of socialists
is to provide such critical tools and terms necessary for dissecting this
situation.
“True compassion is
more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which
produces beggars needs restructuring.”- Martin Luther King, Jr
