5.

Who’s in Charge?

As children, we are told a story: Once upon a time there was a dashing economic system named Capitalism, and it was the fairest economic system of them all. One day, Capitalism met Democracy, the fairest political system of them all, and together they lived happily ever after.

Life has a way of making us skeptical of fairy tales, but we still believe this one, despite all the evidence that capitalism is far from monogamous. All types of political systems have shacked up with capitalism, from parliamentary democracies to military dictatorships to whatever that thing is in Washington, DC, where the people with bad tans and fake hair yell at each other for the cameras. The world’s first democracy in ancient Greece didn’t know about capitalism, while the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler helped some corporations make terrific profits.1

The main point of the equation capitalism = democracy is not to accurately understand either concept but to establish the inverse: socialism = tyranny. These formulas were proven correct in many minds in 1989, when the peoples of Eastern Europe overthrew their supposedly “communist” regimes as they protested their lack of democratic rights and their isolation from the global capitalist economy.

Two decades later, however, another revolutionary year challenged the old math. Whereas in 1989 there were democratic revolutions against regimes that called themselves communist, 2011 saw the fight for democracy break out across the capitalist world. It began with the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, continued with the occupation of the state capitol in Wisconsin and the massive public square assemblies in Greece and Spain, and ended with the Occupy movement in New York, which itself then spread to cities around the globe. The specifics differed in each country, but everywhere in 2011 movements against inequality and budget cuts quickly turned into generation-defining declarations that a better political system is possible. Protesters created popular assemblies and experienced a form of democracy in which the voices and votes of the rich and powerful don’t carry any further than those of anyone else. When Tunisians and Egyptians kicked off the protests against their dictators at the beginning of the year, Western media commentators said that the Arab world was having its “democracy moment.” As the protests spread to the elected governments of Europe and North America, it became clear that even countries with elected governments are still waiting for their democracy moment.

You Can’t Have Billionaires and Democracy

Full democracy is impossible under an economic system that depends on our lack of freedom. As the last chapter described, capitalism allows us to choose what to buy and sell in the marketplace, but it also depends upon a few people owning most of the capital so that the rest of us have no choice over whether or not we want to sell our labor. A system like this simply cannot allow the majority of people to vote on whether or not this setup should be changed. Instead, capitalist democracies grant us the right to vote, but about what, exactly?

Can we democratically decide whether a company should lay off its workers? No. Do we have a say over whether that company can at least not give its executives bonuses while laying off workers? No. Okay, fine. That’s private enterprise. Can we vote on whether our government will spy on us? No.

In 2013 Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the vast domestic surveillance system of the National Security Agency (NSA). “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” lectured Barack Obama. “We’re going have to make some choices as a society.” Who did Obama mean by “we”? Would there be a series of public forums in every community debating the NSA’s powers or private negotiations between the military-industrial complex and tech company executives? The answer to that question tells us who makes the real decisions under capitalism.

Of course, many of us aren’t even allowed to vote. You might not think this has been a major problem since the franchise was extended to women in the Nineteenth Amendment and guaranteed for African Americans with the Voting Rights Act.2 In fact, the number of Americans barred from voting because they are not citizens or because they are currently or formerly incarcerated is almost 10 percent of the voting-age population. That’s more than the margin of victory in most presidential elections.

Then there are cities where the entire population has been stripped of its right to vote for the people in charge. The most well known is Detroit, which in the face of bankruptcy was put under the direct control of an unelected financial manager. Everybody knows that Detroit is broke because the auto companies abandoned it, but those company executives get to enjoy their democratic rights in their new hometowns while the unemployed former workers they left behind bear the political punishment.

Finally, even on the issues that are put up to democratic vote, we are saddled with a two-party system in which the “liberal” Democratic Party might be one of the most criminal organizations in modern history. If you think I’m exaggerating, consider that it’s the Democrats who:

• fought the Civil War on the side of slavery

• created Jim Crow segregation after they lost that war

• dropped the only nuclear weapons on a civilian population in history

• stole a third of Mexico’s land and forced the Cherokee and other tribes on the infamous “trail of tears”

• killed millions in the wars in Korea and Southeast Asia

• doubled the country’s prison population under Bill Clinton

• deported over two million immigrants under Barack . . . you get the picture.

The point is not that there is anything better about Republicans, many of whom probably look at the list above and sigh with envy, but that both major US parties are completely devoted to the priorities of the tiny class that runs this country. Each party may be paid to look out for a particular industry (Republicans get lots of oil money while Democrats are preferred by the tech industry), but sometimes they propose different strategies to achieve the same end, such as whether the United States should destroy Middle Eastern countries with or without the approval of the United Nations.

More often, their differences are even less substantial and are almost entirely about how to get different voting blocs to support the same policies. Republicans proudly announce budget cuts by declaring that they are weaning us off our pathetic addiction to public services like schools and hospitals. Democrats blame Republicans for making them pass budget cuts even when the Democrats are in the majority, and then when they lose that majority they promise to fight like hell against those evil Republican budget cuts. Essentially, the Democrats are the loud guy in the bar pretending to be held back by his friends to keep him from going after someone he has absolutely no intention of fighting.

People who are frustrated with the two-party system frequently talk about the government being broken. But the government works just fine for the One Percent—those corporate tax breaks and bank bailouts get passed right on time. And even when Congress is unable to pass any legislation, the government manages to bomb rural villages, deport parents and separate them from their children, and approve new locations for oil drilling just the same. The only broken part of the government is that small part over which we are allowed to have any say.

It is impossible to have a society with vast economic inequality that does not also have vast political inequality. Here’s another way to put it: you can have billionaires or you can have democracy, but you cannot have a lot of both.

To understand why, we first have to wrap our heads around just how much a billion dollars is, because unless you are a billionaire—and that is not the target demographic of this book—I guarantee you don’t get it. We tend to use the word billion to refer to some countless number just shy of infinity, a ludicrous exaggeration of a million not much different than fake numbers like bajillion and shlazillion.3 A billion is an actual number; a thousand millions, to be precise. But it is a ludicrous amount of money for one person to own.

The typical family in the United States (forget most of the world) has about $75,000 in net worth. A billion dollars is 13,000 times more than that. If that typical all-American family were to stack its wealth in 75,000 individual dollar bills lined end to end, it would extend 7.2 miles. “Son, that’s taller than Mount Everest,” Dad might proudly say as he takes a satisfied puff on his pipe and Sparky gives a bark of approval.4 But if billionaire and ex–New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg showed up and did the same thing, his $25 billion in wealth would stretch all the way to the moon . . . and back . . . five times.

Back on Earth, vast discrepancies in wealth lead to vast discrepancies in power—over all of us. Most readers of this book could probably use an extra thirteen thousand dollars, to pay off their student loans, put something away for retirement, or finally get a car that they can count on. Imagine what unpleasant, embarrassing, or even immoral tasks you might agree to do in exchange for thirteen thousand dollars. . . . Okay, stop imagining. That was disgusting.

Here’s my point: since a billion dollars is thirteen thousand times what the average American owns, a billionaire could give you thirteen thousand dollars to do that undesirable thing and it would cost him the equivalent of one dollar. By the same scale, for a hundred dollars, a billionaire can spend $1.3 million in regular people money, which can buy the support of both candidates in most Congressional races, or pay the salaries of a dozen people to promote his agenda in a think tank or bogus grassroots organization. Having a billion dollars endows him with Godlike powers, and the number of billionaires in the United States has risen from thirteen in 1982 to more than four hundred today. We are seeing the rise of a new race of supermen, and they’re not the good guys.

This isn’t about petty jealousy. That money came from us! The growing wealth of the superrich coincides with declining wealth for the rest of us—not just our personal savings, but the collective wealth of our schools and post offices, our job security and health benefits, and expectations that our kids will have it better than we do. Economic inequality inevitably leads to political inequality, and just as the rich have been gaining political power, we have been losing it. We aren’t just poorer; we’re weaker and less organized. We work longer hours, pay more for health care, scramble to deal with more precarious childcare arrangements. We face more repression from law enforcement when we try to protest—or, if we are immigrants, Muslims, or African Americans, even when we don’t.

Democracy is measured not just by political structures but by the political strength of the people. In Hal Draper’s fascinating series of books about Karl Marx, he notes that in Marx’s time the word democracy was just coming into popular use and that it had multiple meanings.5 In addition to referring to a political system based on elections and individual liberties, democracy could also mean the popular will and mass movements. The Chartist movement in England, which fought for voting rights to be extended to the working class, referred to itself as the democracy. There is an echo of this older usage today in the popular protest chant: This is what democracy looks like! For the most part, however, our definition—and understanding—of democracy has become unfortunately limited to a set of laws. Socialists retain the older, more multifaceted definition because it makes it clear that democracy is something that has to be constantly fought for, even when we live in a political system that calls itself democracy.

Get to Know “Your” Government

Every state hides its unaccountable authority over us by claiming to be so connected to us that accountability is unnecessary. There is supposed to be no difference between us and our government. The US government refers to itself in court cases as “The People” just as Stalinist dictatorships call themselves “People’s Republics.” This isn’t a new development. Frederick the Great of Prussia justified his monarchy by claiming that “the prince is to the nation he governs what the head is to the man; it is his duty to see, think, and act for the whole community.”

In truth the first role of states has always been to see, think, and act for the ruling classes of their time, be they slave owners, feudal aristocrats, or transnational corporations. Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the role of capitalist states was to be “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” This is a vital function because capitalists are too blinded by competition in pursuit of immediate profits to engage in long-term planning. Capitalists are like children, and it’s the state’s job to be the grownup pushing the shopping cart while capitalists sit in the front and make a grab for whatever they want, leaving the state to clean up their spills and put the five boxes of Frosted Flakes back on the shelf.

Capitalists need the state not just to babysit them but to create the basic conditions that make profitable investment possible. The developing capitalist world observed by Adam Smith only existed because of British “enclosure” laws that outlawed the long tradition of common land, which forced millions of poor people to leave the countryside and sell their labor in towns and cities. In the United States, capitalism was greatly helped by some of the Supreme Court’s earliest rulings that business contracts and private property were more important than democracy. In the case of Fletcher v. Peck, for example, the court ruled that the Georgia legislature could not overturn a land deal that had been passed by previous lawmakers—even though it turned out almost all of them had been bribed to pass the deal! This principle that punishing business crimes is less important than creating a stable investment climate has been the law—or lack of law—of the land ever since.

One of the never-ending debates in American politics is about something known as “the role of government.” Conservatives are usually the ones arguing for “small government,” and yet they are huge fans of the vast armed wings of the state that make up by far the biggest aspect of government bureaucracy: the military, police, border patrol, and spy agencies. These are the state’s core functions, the repressive apparatus at the heart of every society where some have and others don’t. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman once wrote approvingly that “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” Similarly, the finance whiz kids in your local city cannot thrive in their gleaming new waterfront luxury apartments without the peace of mind of knowing that the police are all over the far larger numbers of poor kids in the surrounding neighborhoods. What conservatives find to be “government tyranny” are those additional services taken on by twentieth-century governments around the world in response to popular demand: caring for the elderly and the sick, monitoring discrimination and the food supply, and so on.

Liberals (some of them at least) rightly reject the cruel conservative view that the only functions of the state should be repression and corporate catering, and instead assert that government can play a positive role in promoting human welfare. Liberals hold up the decades after World War II as a model, when rich people and corporations paid much higher taxes, unions were at their peak, and a social safety net was created through programs for the poor, sick, unemployed, and elderly. All of this is correct, but let’s think twice about proclaiming the postwar era as a golden age to be re-created. This was a period in which the US policy was to create whites-only suburbs and Black urban ghettos,6 persecute hundreds of thousands of communists, bring the world to the edge of nuclear war, and destroy Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iran through wars and coups. Then there’s the fact that the United States was enjoying the greatest economic boom in world history—which made it possible for rich people to be more generous without seeing their own wealth decline—only due to the unique circumstance that every other industrial country had just been bombed to smithereens. That’s not something we should count on—or hope for—recurring.

The point is that even in the golden age of American liberalism, the government was not an agent of the people. It certainly is not now, when it imprisons more of its people than any nation in the world and is constructing enormous cloud facilities with the capacity to monitor all of its people’s phone and Internet conversations. The only reason we even know about this world-historic surveillance system is because of the bravery of Edward Snowden, who has been charged with violating the Espionage Act. Espionage, notes journalist Glenn Greenwald, is generally defined as passing secrets to the government’s enemies. However, Snowden didn’t reveal the NSA’s secrets to Iran or China but to the general public. What does that say about how the US government regards its people?

And yet none of the endless debates between Republicans and Democrats about the size of government take up the growing power of what is often referred to in other countries as the “deep state.” Understanding the state in this way does not mean we have to fall down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, which imagine that everyone in the government is either involved in secret plots or part of the cover-up. There are plenty of real conspiracies that have been uncovered by excellent journalism—the CIA really did introduce crack into Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, for example, and the journalist who helped to expose that story was basically driven out of mainstream journalism.7 But for the most part, conspiracy theorists are so intent on searching the deepest corners of the Internet for hidden plots that they don’t see that the most obvious conspiracies—like world financial summits and voter suppression—take place right out in the open.

The other problem with most conspiracy theories is that they give the people at the top way too much credit for actually knowing what the hell they’re doing. Even the US government, powerful and destructive as it is, is a servant of the dark ooze of capital, which has no master plan other than making more of itself. The Defense Department, for example, is well aware that global warming is the biggest threat out there. It has funded extensive studies and military scenarios preparing for food riots and refugee rampages. But it doesn’t occur to the most powerful military force in world history that there is something it can do to thwart the threat of climate change itself. Generals could be planning the invasion of the boardrooms of oil companies to order them to switch energy production to solar and wind. Instead they are waging and planning wars to keep the oil flowing and the temperature rising. No matter how many brilliant scientists and strategists it employs, the Pentagon maintains the mindset of a street cop—concerned only about keeping order for the bosses.

Just as capitalism combines the tyranny of the individual owner with the anarchy of all the bosses’ competition with each other, it combines the repression of each state over its own population with the chaos of every state’s competition with every other for control of global trade and military dominance. For all of the growing central and secret powers accruing inside the government, we don’t even get the benefit of that power being used for rational purposes. Socialists call this global anarchy imperialism, and it includes everything from warfare to diplomacy to trade agreements, whatever can give one nation a leg up in what the English used to call the Great Game.8 Part of the game today involves attending global summits about global threats like climate change and nuclear arms, not to genuinely collaborate on solutions but to try to make it look like it’s your rivals’ fault that you didn’t.

Conspiracy theories sound radical, but they actually provide a false comfort for those who are overwhelmed by the complexities of the world’s problems and would prefer to understand them as a plot carried out by a few all-powerful actors. Some people find it easier to view the September 11 attacks as a “false flag” operation carried out within the deepest corners of the Pentagon than to deal with it as one of the many unpredictable but inevitable consequences of the United States waging war across the planet. The truth, which might be more terrifying than a secret all-powerful ruling cabal, is that nobody is fully in charge.

Capitalism puts so much power and wealth in a few hands that from our point of view down below those hands seem to wield complete control. The good news—and the bad news—is that the people in charge of shaping the world for our children often have no clear plan beyond the next election or quarterly earnings report. They veer from crisis to crisis, from the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to the global financial meltdown caused by crooked banks to the ongoing catastrophe of climate change. Ultimately, capitalists find solutions to their crises at our expense—send more troops, close more hospitals—unless our forces are strong enough to stop them.

Most of the time we aren’t strong enough, the troops get deployed, the hospitals closed, and cynics conclude that the whole crisis was just a ruse, which only reinforces our sense of powerlessness. But the crises are real, and they can prove to be capitalism’s undoing—if there is a viable alternative waiting to replace it.

Damn, that would have been a great cliffhanger if the title of the book hadn’t spoiled it.

 

1. Such as Ford, General Motors, and IBM. The official name of the Nazis, by the way, was the National Socialist Party. This is the most horrifying distortion of the socialist label but far from the only one, as we’ll see in chapter 9.

2. Actually the Voting Rights Act (VRA) was greatly weakened by the Supreme Court in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder on the grounds of the following dubious logic: The VRA is no longer necessary because Black people are no longer prevented from voting thanks to the VRA. I’m really glad the Supreme Court isn’t my father’s doctor: Well, Mr. Katch, now that your heart is beating regularly, let’s get that pacemaker out of there.

3. Nobody actually says shlazillion, but I’m trying to make that a thing—as in “There were a shlazillion people at that protest!” or “Socialism . . . Seriously is selling shlazzy copies, yo.” Help me out: #shlazillion

4. In my imaginary family there is no dog, just a fourteen-year-old boy named Sparky who is going through a strange phase. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.

5. It’s a four-volume series called Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution.

6. Look up “redlining.”

7. The reporter’s name was Gary Webb. There’s a movie about him called Kill the Messenger.

8. Specifically “the Great Game” referred to the nineteenth-century British rivalry with Russia for control of Central Asia. This smug name for a century of wars and horrors is a great illustration of the English penchants for understatement, dry wit, and genocide.