Political power, wealth, and business interests are all intimately linked. Rarely do we see one without the others, which can have devastating effects on both democracies and citizens. To paraphrase radical historian Howard Zinn, “The interests of corporations and the interests of the people are not the same.”

I: The Corporate Assault on Democracy

To rise to the highest political positions, an official must have a great deal of money and be well-connected to established political players and business titans. While there are some upsets, the best-funded candidates win congressional elections 86-97% of the time.[1] The same is virtually always true of presidential races.

Corporate donors therefore have a tremendous amount of power. In the Citizens United case of 2010, the Supreme Court allowed corporations to give as much money to political campaigns as they like. Therefore the richest corporations have the greatest ability to help decide elections, leaving poorer businesses, unions, organizations, not to mention the common people, in the dust. (Many problems with corporate influence in government also apply, to a lesser degree, to unions and organizations, from the UAW to the NRA. Solutions like public financing of elections [or perhaps only allowing small campaign donations from individuals] and lobbying reform must apply to all entities.) The 2013 McCutcheon v. F.E.C. case then allowed unlimited individual spending on elections, further empowering the rich to choose candidates.

However, capitalists cannot always know who will receive the most funding nor foresee with absolute certainty the victor, so corporations have long given money to both sides to assure whoever wins will aid their interests (public officials are keen to pay back donors, especially to secure funding for reelection campaigns). A senior vice president of International Telephone and Telegraph put it best in 1960 when he said his company board would “‘butter’ both sides so we’ll be in a good position whoever wins.”[2] As the Center for Responsive politics reported on giving to the party governor associations, “High profile donors that give to both sides include Comcast, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Coca-Cola, AFLAC and Verizon. The majority of these corporations donate about the same amount of money to both sides with five corporations giving exactly 50%: Novartis Corp, Kolhberg & Co, KKR & Co, Jacobs Entertainment Inc. and Intuit Inc.”[3]

Einstein wrote in 1949 that there existed an

…oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education).[4]

Corporations have methods of influencing public policy beyond candidate selection. They either are media companies or own the media (GE owns NBC and Comcast, Disney owns ABC, etc.), and fund think tanks, plus university departments and research institutes.[5] They threaten to move to other cities, states, or countries if politicians don’t enact laws that benefit them; their departure could mean ruin for local economies and working families. Boeing, the largest employer in Wichita, Kansas, infamously held that city—and state—hostage in the early 2000s.[6] Corporations employ armies of lobbyists to bribe politicians with campaign funds to enact or oppose specific policies, such as deregulating industries or putting exemptions into the tax code. Armies of lawyers and accountants then make sure companies are effectively using the loopholes to whittle down their taxes. This has been underway for decades, and now the largest companies pay no taxes, and even get tax refunds. Tax rates for rich individuals have likewise been significantly reduced. See “Giant Corporations Are Not Paying Taxes.”

Corporations lobby to make sure certain unethical and illegal actions can no longer be punished. In 1966, for instance, “auto industry lawyers persuaded members of Congress to delete the criminal penalty from the motor vehicle safety law, even for companies who knowingly sold defective cars or parts—and willfully declined to recall the cars even after their use resulted in injuries or death.”[7] Increased product safety meant higher costs for capitalists, so it was important to minimize or eliminate criminal penalties once they decided to put workers or consumers at risk. Or take the deadly opioid crisis of the first two decades of the 21st century, in which pharmaceutical companies made a killing by ignoring government requirements to report suspiciously large orders of opioids (such as nine million hydrocodone pills over two years to a town of 392 people), which were going to shady pain clinics and thus to addicts. When the DEA began cracking down on this negligence, the pharmaceutical industry launched the usual bribery methods (lobbying, donations to politicians, job offers) to convince Congress to scale back the DEA’s regulatory and enforcement powers.

In addition to the trillions in subsidies and tax breaks they receive, corporations use the government (and taxpayer money) as a life raft when they run into trouble. In the 1980s through the early 2000s, the financial sector succeeded in deregulating the practices of Wall Street banks and insurance companies, allowing those entities to make predatory investments and loans with public money. It was fraud on an unimaginable scale: mortgage lenders handed out low-quality, high-cost (and overvalued) home loans to consumers. This reaped hundreds of billions in profits for the banks, but in 2008 destroyed the housing market when scammed borrowers facing enormously high interest rates and mounting credit couldn’t make their payments. These people lost their homes to foreclosure, millions of nice homes stood empty, and the demand for housing construction vanished. The housing market crashed, and with it nearly the entire national economy (the global economy took a hit as well). Americans who owned stock lost fortunes, the poor lost their homes, and the banks, which loaned and borrowed money from each other, collapsed like dominoes. Yet the government bailed out the largest financial institutions, handing over trillions in taxpayer funds to the very CEOs and boards of directors who created the crisis!

Corporate power players, after all, ran the Department of the Treasury. Former Goldman-Sachs executives, for instance, held many of the top positions in the department, per usual. (Phone records have revealed the heads of financial institutions like Goldman-Sachs, Citigroup, and JP Morgan can get the treasury secretary on the phone several times a day, something no ordinary American is privileged to.[8]) The corporatists would stop at nothing to acquire the fortunes needed to save their corrupt institutions. Bailouts have been common practice for a long time—in 1999, Noam Chomsky pointed out that over 20 corporations on the Fortune 100 list would not still exist if not for public bailouts.[9] Congress gave the banks a $700 billion bailout. Not only did they save their banks, the capitalists awarded themselves millions of dollars in record bonuses. Today, the same men still control the financial sector and the governmental body in charge of overseeing it. “Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud,” reported Charles Ferguson in 2011 (Inside Job), “not a single financial executive has gone to jail.” Finally, one did in 2014. He got a sentence of 30 months.[10]

Senator Bernie Sanders summarized the state of American politics well when he said, “Wall Street is extraordinarily powerful. Congress doesn’t regulate them… Wall Street regulates Congress,”[11] in the same way Populist Party orator Mary Ellen Lease summarized it in 1890: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.”[12] In the Trilateral Commission report of 1976, Samuel Huntington of Harvard, a consultant to the White House during the Vietnam War, wrote that the country was “governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector’s ‘Establishment.’” He was not being critical. He believed there was an “excess of democracy,” recommending “limits to the extension of political democracy.”[13]

Corporations now design the very laws by which they must abide. Ralph Nader writes, “Few regulations are issued without heavy tinkering by corporate attorneys; the results are often obsolete before they are enacted” and “corporate lobbies have effected changes in the law that reduce or escape fines, cap damages under tort law, hold enforcement budgets down, appoint enforcers from their own executive ranks to head agencies, and pour money into the coffers of political parties and candidates.”[14] In 2013, 70 of the 85 lines in a bill on financial reform came straight from a draft created by Citigroup lobbyists.[15] Groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bring together local lawmakers and business titans to draft legislation that ends up being voted on and thus benefiting the corporate designers.[16] Corporate influence leads to all kinds of lunacy, from Obama pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which allowed corporations to sue governments, including the U.S., if their policies interfered with corporate profits, to the weakening of anti-trust (anti-monopoly) laws, allowing corporations to swallow up or eradicate competitors.

2013 research from Political Research Quarterly showed that both political parties follow the whims of their wealthy constituents and donors, and during the 111th Congress Democrats were worse than Republicans in serving lower-income, majority interests.[17] A 2014 study from Northwestern University and Princeton University found that when economic elites overwhelmingly oppose a law, it only has an 18% chance of enactment.[18] Researchers concluded, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” In 2017, Republicans were openly admitting that it was urgent to pass a new tax law or donors would abandon them. It is no coincidence that the Democrats who oppose Medicare-For-All get the most from the health insurance industry or that Republican leadership got huge corporate donations days after slashing the corporate tax rate.

Corporate executives are regularly installed in high government positions and set about serving the interests of private capital. President Nixon appointed a businessman to head OSHA who “was hostile to OSHA’s aims. One of his first acts was to order the destruction of 100,000 government booklets pointing out the dangers of cotton dust to textile workers.”[19] In 2013, President Obama announced that Tom Wheeler, former executive of (and Washington lobbyist for) cable and telecommunication giants, would be the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Wheeler, after all, raised almost three-quarters of $1 billion for Obama’s two presidential campaigns.[20] A man who spent decades lobbying for deregulation for some of the wealthiest corporations was now head of the government agency responsible for overseeing and regulating the same industry. Within a year, Wheeler was leading the charge to further allow monopolistic practices among Internet, cable, and phone service corporations, and dismantle net neutrality regulations. A later FCC chair attempting to axe net neutrality, Ajit Pai, was a former lawyer for Verizon, one of the companies pushing for the same. Things of course reached an absurd level under President Trump. His secretary of energy was on the board of directors of Energy Transfer Partners and earlier said he wanted to abolish the Department of Energy. His head of the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t believe in climate change and was at the time suing the EPA over environmental and health regulations. His National Economic Council director, chief strategist, and treasury secretary were all Goldman Sachs boys. His education secretary favored private schooling without government oversight over public schools, and was in no way qualified for the job, but donated huge sums to the Republican Party. His Health and Human Services director was a Big Pharma exec.[21] Most all were extraordinarily wealthy.

Not only do corporate millionaires and billionaires become powerful politicians and federal agency heads, many public officials retire and join corporate lobbying firms. The politicians who once at least put up a façade of serving the public make millions using their political connections to influence legislation to the benefit of corporations. It is called the “revolving door.” It is a two-way street of corruption and client politics. In 1974, only 3% of retiring Congressmen became lobbyists, but now it’s 50% of Senators and over 40% of House Representatives.[22] A 2012 article from the Nation reminded us, “Politicians never have to disclose job negotiations while in office, and never have to disclose how much they’re paid after leaving office,” leaving corporations free to

…secretly promise [politicians] a million dollars or more in pay if they come to work for [them] after they leave office. Once a public official makes a deal to go to work for a lobbying firm or corporation after leaving office, he or she becomes loyal to the future employer. And since those deals are done in secret, legislators are largely free to pass laws, special tax cuts, or earmarks that benefit their future employer with little or no accountability to the public.[23]

The average increase in salary for a lawmaker-turned-lobbyist in 2011 was 1,452%.[24] This is just an example of the rich getting richer, however. In 2009, nearly half of all 535 congressmen were millionaires, with a median net worth of $1.8 million for senators and over $620,000 for house representatives.[25] In 2012, over half of Congresspersons were millionaires.

It also takes money to preserve political careers, a large part of the problem. Congressmen spend 25% to 50% of their time in office fundraising, possibly more during election years. Even congressmen who have no chance of being voted out of office still are required to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for their party, to be used to support tight races. Thus politicians spend enormous amounts of time at dinners where donors pay huge sums of money per plate, or on the phone asking for contributions, instead of focusing on legislation the people desire.[26]

The Center for Responsive Politics tracks lobbying and corporate spending to influence law, and found the financial and real estate sector spent nearly $500 million in 2013 alone. The health care industry spent about the same. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce alone spent nearly $75 million on lobbying, the National Association of Realtors $38.5 million, Blue Cross/Blue Shield $22.5 million. Thousands of firms poured a collective $3.21 billion into lobbying. Campaign coffers overflowed with legalized bribes: the 113th Congress got $30 million worth of contributions from law firms, $16.5 million from real estate firms, $14 million from insurance powers. Nearly 130 senior staff (aides and advisors who work for lawmakers) of the 112th Congress were former lobbyists. In 2018, the Trump administration included 164 former lobbyists. The White House and the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture have each employed over 1,000 people who were once lobbyists or went on to become lobbyists. The CIA, the Army, the Federal Reserve, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Education, Treasury, Transportation—virtually every agency—is infested with officials with business associations and interests.[27]

This can have enormous effects. Take the construction of the transcontinental railroad, one of the most important achievements for the development of our nation. Railroad companies

became dependents on government, using their initial capital not to start construction, but to bribe legislators…the first transcontinental railroad was not built by laissez-faire. The railroad capitalists did it with government land and money…the Central Pacific, starting on the West Coast, got 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in loans (after spending $200,000 in Washington for bribes).

The Union Pacific railroad sold shares to congressmen at discounted rates because, as one congressman involved in the bribe said, “There is no difficulty in getting men to look after their own property” (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States)!

Indeed, the deals and favors border on the absurd. After Reagan removed controls on oil prices, essentially awarding $2 billion to the oil industry, twenty three oil executives donated over a quarter-million dollars to redecorate the White House living quarters; the owner of the Core Oil and Gas Company said, “The top man of this country ought to live in one of the top places. Mr. Reagan has helped the energy business.”[28] Lobbying is an extraordinarily important practice for oil and gas companies in the face of the environmentalist movement, as massive sums of cash help keep politicians in line with industry objectives and garner profitable subsidies. The industry spent nearly $41 million on politicians’ campaigns in 2013 and 2014. Total, the industry spent over $326 million lobbying the U.S. government. The government spent nearly $34 billion on the fossil fuel industry in the same time period, in the form of subsidies, a nice return on an investment.[29] University of Kansas Law School researchers found that for every dollar spent on lobbying, companies received $220 in tax breaks—a return of 22,000%.[30]

That is the corporate assault on our democracy. It is dangerous because in a democracy decision-making power is supposed to rest with the people, who send public officials to Washington to represent them. Those with greater wealth are not supposed to have more influence and control over the process. If the majority of the people want to protect the environment but oil companies do not, who should win?

II: The Corporate Assault on Human Beings

Yet the dangers of capitalist control of government are overshadowed by the physical perils of the profit motive (distinct from the theft that constitutes capitalistic exploitation). Corporate abuse harms and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people worldwide each year and can work against positive social goals, like ending drug addiction, establishing safer workplaces, or protecting the environment (we’ve seen elsewhere the damage capitalism is doing to our planet). Corporate abuse takes place to increase profits, and weak regulations and harmless consequences allow it to continue.

Profit is why corporations sell addictive, deadly cigarettes, which kill more people than all illegal drugs combined. Profit is why tobacco companies kept knowledge of cancer and other dangers secret.[31] Profit is why the National Football League tried to bury findings on CTE, the brain injury many players sustain.[32] Profit is why Big Oil buried its own findings that manmade CO2 was contributing to climate change.[33] Profit is why the quality of fast food is so poor, why much of it is packed with dangerously addictive levels of sugar, salt, and fat, as well as chemical additives and preservatives. Profit is why innocent people are dropped from their health insurance coverage when they get sick or denied insurance when applying for it, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths each year.[34] Profit is why energy companies want inefficient modes of transit and electricity, and therefore fight tooth and nail against cleaner, more efficient forms of energy, higher MPG requirements, and stricter environmental standards. General Motors and Chevron bought up and destroyed Los Angeles’ public rail system to make way for their products.[35]

Laws with no teeth allow corporations to dump toxic waste or install garbage incinerators in poor minority areas, and to poison our air, water, and soil with pollutants, pesticides, and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) toxins. Profit is the reason drug companies “promote off-label or unapproved uses for their medicines through their salespeople and physicians,” resulting in tens of thousands of deaths each year.[36] It’s why drug companies focus research and development on medicine for minor problems that have to be bought continuously over a lifetime, and focus less on drugs for diseases like malaria, whose victims have no money.[37] It’s why some companies research ways to make their products wear out faster, so people have to buy more—“planned obsolescence.”[38] It’s why oil companies sometimes conspire to hold back production to keep prices up—this has been done not just by Arabian oil cartels but also by American firms.[39]

Weak regulations are why employers casually violate rules for worker safety, leading to everything from lead and asbestos poisoning to maiming, blindness, and death. “In the ’80s, the Reagan administration essentially informed the business world that it was not going to prosecute violations of OSHA regulations. As a result, the number of industrial accidents went up rather dramatically…working days lost to injury almost doubled from 1983 to 1986…”[40] In 2014, Congress changed safety rules for truck drivers, raising the number of hours per week an employee could drive from 70 to 82—despite recent deaths on the roads caused by exhausted truck drivers.[41] Businesses had money to make. In 2016, Oxfam reported that American workers in poultry plants were denied bathroom breaks so often that workers had to wear diapers. Oxfam said that “the cost of cheap chicken in the U.S. is workers who face low wages, suffer elevated rates of injury and illness and face a climate of fear in the workplace.” It reported that

…unnamed workers from Tyson Foods Inc., Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., Perdue Farms Inc. and Sanderson Farms Inc… said that supervisors mock them, ignore requests and threaten punishment or firing. When they can go, they wait in long lines even though they are given limited time, sometimes 10 minutes, according to the report. Some workers have urinated or defecated themselves while working because they can’t hold on any longer… Some workers “restrict intake of liquids and fluids to dangerous degrees”…[42]

Workers and undercover journalists report appalling conditions at Amazon warehouses, where too much deviation from the breakneck pace will get workers fired, forcing them to urinate in trashcans and bottles to avoid bathroom break penalties, some collapsing from exhaustion and leaving in ambulances. There exist penalties for sick days (like at Walmart), and wages are so low some workers resort to camping near the warehouses. Walmart and Amazon have patented systems to listen to employee conversations and track hand movements in real time, respectively. At Tesla factories, energy drinks are distributed to combat exhaustion, and not even a raw sewage spill under workers’ feet will stop production.

Employers often find it more profitable to put worker lives on the line and simply risk paying pennies in fines (illegal immigrants can have it even worse). Nader writes:

Roughly sixty thousand Americans die each year due to workplace-related toxins and trauma. OSHA has an annual budget of $550 million to diminish the occupational disease, death, and injury epidemic, but only a portion of that budget is used for actual inspections and enforcement. Violations that pose a substantial probability of death or serious injury incur an average penalty of only $910.

60,000 Americans a year. The International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency, estimates over 650,000 workers around the world die each year from workplace hazards and toxins; 160 million people grow ill.[43] No, not all these deaths are due to capitalist negligence in the name of profit – accidents happen, and many jobs are dangerous by nature – but some are. For example, from 2009 to 2010, 137 Apple workers were poisoned by inhaling hexane, a chemical in gasoline used to clean the glass cases on iPhones. Apple favored hexane over something safer, like alcohol, because hexane dries very quickly, meaning faster production.[44]

If it’s not the employees at risk, it’s the consumers. In the 1970s, after defective fuel tanks in Ford Pintos were revealed to explode in some accidents, Ford calculated that it would be cheaper to pay lawsuit settlements ($200,000 for each case) than recall and repair the cars ($137 million). Ford did not fix the problem. 180 innocent people died each year from explosions linked to the defective fuel tanks.[45] In 2015, the Justice Department declared GM had intentionally misled the public about its defective ignition switches, which killed 124 people. At the same time, Volkswagen was found to have installed software in its vehicles that could detect and trick emissions tests.

None of this is new. As capitalism matured, industrializing nations saw horrific suffering as armies of poor men, women, and children were worked to exhaustion in factories, plants, and mines. Dying or losing limbs on the job and starving to death at home were the realities for millions of human beings during the Industrial Revolution. Ordinary people saw their employers grow rich, while they were given barely enough to stay alive. Victor Hugo[46] in the 1880s told the rich of England:

The workers of this world whose fruits you enjoy live in death. There are little girls who begin at eight by prostitution, and who end at twenty by old age. Who among you have been to Newcastle-on-Tyne? There are men in the mines who chew coal, to fill their stomach and cheat hunger. Look you in Lancashire. Misery everywhere. Are you aware that the Harlech fishermen eat grass when the fishery fails? Are you aware that at Burton- Lazers there are still certain lepers driven into the woods, who are fired at if they come out of their dens? In Peckridge there are no beds in the hovels, and holes are dug in the ground for little children to sleep in; so that, in place of beginning with the cradle, they begin with the tomb.[47]

In 1904, 27,000 American workers were killed at work; in 1914, 35,000 died in industrial accidents.[48] In the U.S. and across the world, workers had to organize, unionize, strike, protest, and riot for government regulations, for safer working conditions, decent pay, shorter days, weekends, the end of child labor, and equal opportunity and treatment for minorities and women.

At times the deaths of employees can be profitable to capitalists in a more direct way. “Dead peasant insurance” (or “corporate-owned life insurance”) is used when a corporation takes out a life insurance policy on an employee or former employee and receives cash upon his or her death. It was originally a way to insure the lives of top executives and buffer against turmoil and collapse in the case of an executive death, but it was later extended to cover even the lowest-paid employees because it was profitable to do so. Capitalism: A Love Story stresses this is a common practice in corporate America, with Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, Bank of America, AT&T, and Citibank among the many guilty firms. It tells the tale of Daniel Johnson, whose employer received $1.5 million upon his death, and explains how corporate owners compare worker deaths and insurance rewards against “expected mortality” estimates to increase the efficacy and profitability of the system. From a 2002 Wall Street Journal report we learned that when former employee Filipe Tillman died of AIDS, Camelot Music collected $339,302; when store clerk William Smith was murdered at work, National Convenience Stores collected $250,000; when nurse Peggy Stillwagoner died in a car wreck, Advantage Medical Services collected $200,000.[49] It is difficult to call our society civilized when corporations actively find ways to profit from worker deaths. Government regulation in 2006 required employers to get employee consent before taking out a policy and restricted the use to higher-paid employees. But this effort was weak, as it left a deplorable practice completely legal. In 2011, the owner of an oil-change business tried to hire a hit man to murder a former employee so the owner could collect $250,000.[50]

A 2016 CBS News investigation found mass fraud throughout the life insurance industry. Firms like MetLife, Prudential, and John Hancock didn’t pay death benefits to family members of the deceased who weren’t aware they were beneficiaries. Instead of honoring the deceased, who paid for the policies to make sure their families would have money in case something happened to them, the companies cancelled the unclaimed policies and kept the sums. Millions of such policies were wrongfully and knowingly cancelled, saving the companies billions. 25 companies settled lawsuits and paid $7.5 billion in owed death benefits. 35 more were under investigation that year.[51]

Clearly, the interests of corporations and the interests of the people are not the same.

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Notes

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/11/money-wins-white-house-and/

[2] Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 548

[3] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/11/democrats-and-republicans-sharing-b/

[4] Einstein, Why Socialism?

[5] http://time.com/4148838/koch-brothers-colleges-universities/

[6] Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, 86-88

[7] Nader, Seventeen Solutions

[8] Maass, Case for Socialism, 93.

[9] Chomsky, The Common Good, 73

[10] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html?_r=0

[11] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/18/1092100/-Bernie-Sanders-Congress-doesn-t-regulate-banks-banks-regulate-congress-Must-see

[12] Zinn, People’s, 288

[13] Zinn, People’s 559-560

[14] Nader, Seventeen Solutions

[15] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/29/business/dealbook/29lobbyists-documents.html, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/citigroup-bill-passes-house/

[16] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2002/09/ghostwriting-law/

[17] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/19/oligarchic-tendencies-study-finds-only-the-wealthy-get-represented-in-the-senate/

[18] http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-us-no-longer-democracy

[19] Zinn, People’s, 575

[20] http://business.time.com/2013/05/02/tom-wheeler-former-lobbyist-and-obama-fundraiser-tapped-to-lead-fcc/

[21] http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a23922/donald-trump-cabinet-appointments/; https://www.axios.com/alex-azar-made-millions-in-the-drug-industry-1513307070-2fdf898e-f5a1-409e-a7bf-53d5535a5f1b.html

[22] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/books/review/this-town-by-mark-leibovich.html?pagewanted=all

[23] http://www.thenation.com/article/166809/when-congressman-becomes-lobbyist-he-gets-1452-percent-raise-average#

[24] http://www.thenation.com/article/166809/when-congressman-becomes-lobbyist-he-gets-1452-percent-raise-average#

[25] Alan Maass, Case for Socialism, 106

[26] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk

[27] http://www.opensecrets.org/influence/; https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/07/revolving-door-update-trump-administration/

[28] Zinn, People’s, 577

[29] http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-industry-influence-in-the-u-s/

[30] http://archive.news.ku.edu/2009/april/9/taxlobbying.shtml

[31] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/big-tobacco-kept-cancer-risk-in-cigarettes-secret-study/

[32] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-nfl-worked-to-hide-the-truth-about-concussions-and-brain-damage-excerpt/

[33] https://gsgriffin.com/2016/12/08/even-oil-companies-know-global-warming-is-man-made/

[34] https://gsgriffin.com/2017/06/14/free-market-healthcare-is-immoral/

[35] Chomsky, Common Good, 59

[36] Nader, Seventeen Solutions

[37] Imagine, 181

[38] Imagine, 181

[39] Zinn, People’s, 549

[40] Chomsky, Common Good

[41] http://socialistworker.org/2014/12/18/washingtons-presents-1-percent

[42] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-11/poultry-workers-in-diapers-as-bathroom-breaks-denied-oxfam-says

[43] http://www.ilo.org/public/english/region/eurpro/moscow/areas/safety/statistic.htm

[44] Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA, 232

[45] Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, 74

[46] How socialist was Hugo? See http://isreview.org/issue/89/enduring-relevance-victor-hugo

[47] Hugo, “The Rich”

[48] Zinn, People’s, 327

[49] http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/april_19.htm

[50] http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2014/06/26/does-sneaky-boss-have-life-insurance-on/

[51] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-life-insurance-investigation-lesley-stahl/

Both racism and illegal immigration have been enormously beneficial to capitalism.

In human history, the idea of biological inferiority only became widespread alongside the rise of the African slave trade, as traders and merchants needed a justification for the enslavement of millions of people who were neither prisoners of war nor individual debtors (the traditional justifications for slavery among Europeans). Perpetuating the myth that blacks were little better than animals allowed organizers and participants in the slave trade to reap colossal profits from free labor with impunity. Racism served the monetary interests of a certain few.

Even after slavery ended, racism was used to justify further oppression and wage theft by the capitalist class. Just as emancipation would mean the end of free labor for slave-owners, human equality would force business owners to pay blacks the same wages as whites. Racism served to prevent this, just as sexism and xenophobia prevented the same for women, undocumented immigrants, and non-whites in general. In Communism and the Negro (1933), New Yorker Max Shachtman (head of the Worker’s Party) wrote:

The ruling class is in urgent need of the theory of racial inferiority… It affords them a moral justification for the super-exploitation and persecution to which it subjects the Negro. If trifling sums are allocated for Negro education, he is, after all, “only a nigger.”; if housing conditions are abominable, if the Negro is scandalously underpaid, if he is deprived of every democratic right, he is, after all, an inferior who does not deserve or require better; if he is hanged from a tree and riddled with bullets, or soaked with oil and burned to death by a mob of savages, it is, after all, “only a nigger” who suffers.^[1]

Racism served capitalists a second way: it discouraged workers of different colors from uniting and unionizing to push for higher wages, shorter workweeks, or more decent working conditions and treatment. There was racial hostility in the competition for work, and corporations often responded to strikes by hiring unemployed blacks to replace white strikers, as they could pay them dismal wages with less threat of resistance. The racial tension and violence this created impeded the progress of interracial organizing and helped keep the working class poor.

Prominent black leaders saw the connection between racism and capitalism. Malcolm X said, “You can’t have capitalism without racism”; Stokely Carmichael said, “Racism gets its power from capitalism”; and Dr. King said, “The evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are all tied together.”^[2] They knew that racism served capitalists’ financial interests, whether consciously or as a matter of course.

Illegal immigration has likewise enormously benefited capitalism, both in the U.S. and worldwide, in a similar way to how racism benefits capitalism. In the U.S. it is illegal to hire undocumented workers; employers do so regardless, particularly in the manufacturing, construction, agriculture, restaurant, and service sectors.

Illegal immigrants are some of the most exploited workers in history. (See Amnesty Solves Conservative Criticisms of Illegal Immigration for more on this general topic.) With employers holding the power to fire or turn them in to the authorities, undocumented workers face dismal pay, harsh working conditions, and an inability to organize and unionize to improve their position. They are not entitled to a minimum wage, nor benefits, nor overtime, nor child labor protections, nor in most states injury compensation. In 2008 authorities discovered children as young as 13 working in an Iowa meatpacking plant, and beaten and bruised adults working 17-hour days.^[3]

Alan Maass writes:

For corporations and the U.S. political establishment, immigration has nothing to do with making opportunities available to the world’s poor and suffering. Like slavery in an early era, the key is how immigration guarantees a pool of cheap and easily controlled labor.

If you look at the history of the United States, the idea that immigration controls and border security are about keeping immigrant labor out is laughable. For two centuries, one group after another was encouraged to move to the United States under conditions of illegality, and be the scapegoat at the bottom of the heap. Irish, Jews, Germans, Swedes, southern Italians, Eastern Europeans, Asians, Mexicans, Central Americans, Muslims…^[4]

Capitalists can increase their profits by taking advantage of millions of people, again whether intentionally or as a natural, inadvertent consequence. Capitalism benefits from a steady flow of illegal immigrants.

It is very interesting to note that in this case the ideology of anti-immigrant conservatives does not align with the interests of capitalist power. So often conservatism serves corporate interests, such as the hostility toward environmental protection regulations and the opposition to the minimum wage.

But here racism benefits capitalism in one way and hurts it in another. Virulent racism allowed for the super-exploitation of certain groups of people, but also created masses of racist people who opposed the arrival of blacks, Jews, Greeks, Italians, Hispanics, etc. throughout American history. Most all non-Western European immigration, legal and illegal, has been opposed because of bigotry at various times. The current anti-immigrant hysteria certainly has a racial component. In sum, while capitalism benefits from illegal immigration the same racism that also benefits capitalism encourages people to oppose illegal immigration, screaming for deportation, patrolling borders as vigilantes, and calling for the construction of massive walls.

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Notes

^[1] Schachtman, Communism and the Negro

^[2] Malcolm X, remarks at Militant Labor Forum Symposium, May 29, 1964; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tug8RJyLoz0; Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam: Breaking the Silence

^[3] http://www.alternet.org/story/94703/exploited%3A_the_plight_of_the_undocumented_worker

^[4] Maass, The Case for Socialism

“My socialism was natural to me and not adopted from any books. It came out of my unshakable belief in non-violence. No man could be actively non-violent and not rise against social injustice, no matter where it occurred.”

India of My Dreams (1947), Gandhi

“I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave [capitalistic] evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an education system which would be oriented toward social goals.”

Why Socialism? (1949), Albert Einstein

“How did I become a socialist? By reading.”

How I Became a Socialist (1912), Helen Keller

“If we are to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”

Letter from the Selma, Alabama jail (1965), Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I was already It, whatever It was, and by aid of the books I discovered that It was a Socialist. Since that day I have opened many books, but no economic argument, no lucid demonstration of the logic and inevitableness of Socialism affects me as profoundly and convincingly as I was affected on the day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down, down, into the shambles at the bottom.”

How I Became a Socialist (1905), Jack London

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”

Why I Write (1946), George Orwell

“Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?”

A Man Without A Country (2005), Kurt Vonnegut

“It is true, as I have already stated, that I have been influenced by Marxist thought. But this is also true of many of the leaders of the new independent States. Such widely different persons as Gandhi, Nehru, Nkrumah, and Nasser all acknowledge this fact. We all accept the need for some form of socialism to enable our people to catch up with the advanced countries of this world and to overcome their legacy of extreme poverty.”

In His Own Words (2003), Nelson Mandela

“Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.”

New Worlds for Old (1908), H.G. Wells

“I have become a Communist because our party strives more than any other to know and to build a better world, to make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy.”

Why I Joined the Communist Party (1944), Pablo Picasso

“If being a communist or being a capitalist or being a socialist is a crime, first you have to study which of those systems is the most criminal. And then you’ll be slow to say which one should be in jail.”

Malcolm X Speaks (1965), Malcolm X

“I am too artistic to deal with money in any way, basically. I am a socialist who just happens to be getting this money.”

The Playboy interviews (1981), John Lennon

“The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. I certainly proved it…running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to ‘End Poverty in California’ I got 879,000.”

Letter to Norman Thomas (1951), Upton Sinclair

“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1895), Oscar Wilde

“Socialism was reason.”

Timebends: A Life (1987), Arthur Miller

“The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape.”

To Gustav Janouch in Conversations with Kafka (1971), Franz Kafka

“A completely socialistic result depends on who does the planning and for what ends. A state socialism planned by the rich for their own survival is quite possible, but it is far from the state where the rule rests in the hands of those who produce wealth and services and whose aim is the welfare of the mass of the people.”

If Eugene Debs Returned (1956), W.E.B Du Bois

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We often hear that, from the schools to the mail, the government cannot be trusted to successfully run anything. The prevailing attitude seems to be that government initiatives fail because it is the nature of government initiatives to fail.

While there are many government efforts that need to be purged of corruption and inefficiency, this attitude ignores how successfully the U.S. and other advanced nations have used indicative planning, the hiring of citizens or corporations, to help achieve their goals. Indicative planning means investing tax dollars in specific industries. When government projects are successfully funded and run by skilled people, the results can be astounding.

For example, Ralph Nader writes in The Seventeen Solutions, “Few people know that much of the modern pharmaceutical, aerospace, biotechnology, agronomy, computer, containerization, and detection industries flow from R&D [government research and development], enabled and funded by the taxpayer.” The government poured money into these industries, contracting with companies, universities, organizations, and individuals to research, design, and build for them everything from computer systems to drugs to cruise missiles. Today, we lead the world in these fields.

Does anyone find it a coincidence that our nation spends more money on its military than any other and has the most powerful and advanced bombs, planes, tanks, and ships? Is it coincidence that poorly-funded urban public school districts struggle while well-funded suburban public school districts thrive? Could it be that government-run projects can actually be quite successful if prioritized?

The truth is most advanced capitalist governments plan, investing in key industries (such as computers, pharmaceuticals, energy, or weapons) and infrastructure development (highways, roads, bridges, dams, public transportation). This is accomplished by “working with, rather than against, the private sector.” Governments use a carrot (such as subsidies) and stick (regulations) approach to achieve their goals.

During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, Civil Works Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps hired some 15.5 million people to build roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, museums, and zoos; to garden, plant trees, fight fires, reseed land, save wildlife, and sew; to undertake art, music, drama, education, writing, and literacy projects. Similar federal initiatives have occurred since, such as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of the 1970s, which employed 750,000 people by 1978. In countless other programs, like the Public Works Administration of the 1930s, the U.S. government indirectly created jobs by paying businesses to tackle huge projects. Construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 60s entailed the federal government funding the states, which either expanded their public workforces or contracted with private companies.

Economist Ha-Joon Chang writes, “Planning in certain forms is not incompatible with capitalism and may even promote capitalist development very well.” Free-market ideologues are misguided in thinking any planning whatsoever slows economic growth. Even bureaucratic central planning can be “successful,” meaning accomplishing what the planners intended. Planning worked well in the first stages of Soviet industrialization, “where the main task was to produce a relatively small number of key products in large quantities (steel, tractors, wheat, potatoes, etc.)” and unemployment was eliminated.

Harman writes, “For 30 years Stalinist methods produced more rapid rates of economic growth than those experienced anywhere else in the world—except perhaps Japan.”^[1] Russia saw success advancing militarily, unsurprising considering the vast resources and manpower wasted on such efforts. One of the most backward, rural nations on earth became a superpower in a very short period of time through central planning. In fact, the Soviet model was based on the war economies of Germany, Britain, the U.S., and others, whose governments planned virtually all economic activity during World War II. Doing so was crucial to the Allied victory.

In the early 1950s, the Chinese copied Stalinist methods, controlling all resources and workers, and from 1954-1957 had a growth rate of 12% a year—in 1958-1959 it was nearly 30%.^[2] It is not that bureaucratically planning the economy is impossible; it’s that State power is too dangerous. Authoritarian bureaucracy wiped out human freedoms, oppressed foreign peoples, slaughtered armies of innocent people, and bred widespread poverty. Had the planners aimed to eradicate disease, hunger, and homelessness, they could have done so. But money spent on nuclear bombs and space programs cannot be spent on food and homes. The Cuban government knew that it could not hope to compete with the United States militarily, so its central planners had the resources to pour into health care. Today, Cuba has high-quality universal health care and is a global leader in biochemical and pharmaceutical research.^[3]

Indicative planning has also been quite successful in other nations. The world’s rich nations did not grow rich despite planning, but in many ways because of it. France overtook Britain as Europe’s second most powerful industrial nation by promoting investment and technological innovation in the 1950s and 60s. Finland, Norway, and Austria used careful indicative planning to boost their economies between 1950 and 1970. In the 1950s through the 80s, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan followed suit.^[4]

Large U.S. government investment in research and development gave us a technological lead internationally in military and tech fields; we invest more in R&D than most other capitalist nations, making us one of the most planned on earth. Capitalist economies have greatly benefited from government planning in certain sectors when goals are clear, simple, and contracted voluntarily.

Nader writes in The Seventeen Solutions of a powerful instance of planning in action:

One telling example comes out of the Vietnam War, when the second cause of hospitalization for U.S. soldiers was malaria. The Department of Defense could not interest the drug companies in doing research to develop more effective pharmaceuticals against this debilitating disease; there simply wasn’t much profit in such an effort. So the Pentagon started what in effect was its own drug company at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital. With minuscule budgets, officers with PhDs and MDs went to work on the problem. Their productivity was remarkable, their results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. By 2000, three of the four most widely used antimalarial drugs used in the world had come out of this Pentagon unit, along with other important, clinically-tested medicines.

Investment and planning spark innovation and build up private industries. The government demands, the market supplies. With an appropriate social goal, committed and qualified experts, and (sometimes even minuscule) funds, the U.S. produced medicines that saved lives. In the same way, the government funded a group of scientists and engineers to construct an atom bomb to destroy lives during the Manhattan Project; the goal was planned and executed in brilliant and terrifying fashion.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Bill Gates called the free market “in general inept” when it comes to developing clean energy because “energy moves very slowly.”

For energy as a whole, the incentive to invest is quite limited, because unlike digital products—where you get very rapid adoption and so, within the period that your trade secret stays secret or your patent gives you a 20-year exclusive, you can reap incredible returns—almost everything that’s been invented in energy was invented more than 20 years before it got scaled usage. So if you go back to various energy innovators, actually, they didn’t do that well financially. The rewards to society of these energy advances—not much of that is captured by the individual innovator, because it’s a very conservative market.

Thus it is useful for the government to step in and spur development through indicative planning. Gates said since “there’s no fortune to be made…without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch” to clean energy. He recommended “tripling” “government-funded energy R&D.” “Since World War II, U.S.-government R&D has defined the state of the art in almost every area” of energy development, and “the overall record for the United States on government R&D is very, very good”; here Gates cites the Manhattan Project, pharmaceutical research, cancer research, Internet and computer chip technology, and so on.^[5]

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Notes

^[1] Harman, People’s History of the World, 560

^[2] Harman, People’s History of the World, 573

^[3] Imagine, 185-186

^[4] Ha-Joong Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism

^[5] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/

In the 1930s, labor leaders and workers in Spain formed communes where a general assembly elected members of a governing committee. Most of these members performed the same tasks as everyone else, but met at the end of the day to discuss, organize, and plan. Both the committee and regular workers could call for a general assembly meeting. Within the communes there was an emphasis on educating oneself by studying the arts and sciences while off-duty. Workers were paid only for working; there were no handouts. There were thousands of communes and hundreds of thousands of members.^[1]

1931 saw the end of Spain’s monarchy, and in 1936 the Popular Front ousted conservatives from power. The common people celebrated by freeing prisoners, refusing to pay rent to landlords, and seizing land from owners and working it for themselves. When General Francisco Franco attempted to seize power in a coup, Madrid, Barcelona, and most other major cities erupted into violence as the people stole weapons from armories and attacked Franco’s forces. It was a storm of such fury that in many places, like Aragon, Castile, the Levant, Catalonia, and Andalusia, the authorities found that

…they simply not longer existed. The State, the police, the army, the administration, all seemed to have lost their raison d’être. The Civil Guard had been driven off or liquidated and the victorious workers were maintaining order… committees distributed foodstuffs from barricades transformed into canteens, and then opened communal restaurants. Local administration was organized by neighborhood committees, and war committees saw to the departure of the workers’ militia to the front.^[2]  

George Orwell joined the anarchists. He wrote of Barcelona:

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with the red and black flag of the Anarchists… Every shop and cafe had been collectivized… Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.^[3]

Rudolf Rocker wrote, “Everyone who visited Barcelona…was surprised at the freedom of public life and the absence of any arrangements for suppressing the free expression of opinion.”^[4]

Orwell wrote of Aragon:

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life – snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. – had ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.^[5]

Membrilla was “perhaps the poorest village of Spain, but…the most just.” It had an elected council that established committees to oversee village life. Food, clothing, and tools were passed out equally, and money was abolished.^[6]

Despite many challenges, like government restriction of credit, the socialist communities performed well economically; they even had social projects for the elderly, children, and disabled.^[7] Unfortunately, the Spanish anarchists were bitterly divided over whether to take part in national politics, and those that did were forced into an alliance with political parties (and even Stalin in Russia) to survive against Franco.^[8] In the end, Franco was victorious, crushed the popular movement and the communes, and reigned as dictator for 36 years. The anarchist committees and collectivized workplaces were dismantled “with the same energy as in the U.S.S.R.”^[9] Picasso, who once said, “I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting,”^[10] depicted the ruin Franco brought to Spain in his drawing The Dream and Lie of Franco.

Picasso wrote in Why I Joined the Communist Party (1944), “I have become a Communist because our party strives more than any other to know and to build a better world, to make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy.”

Socialism in Spain and the early Soviet Union did not fail because it is in the nature of socialism to fail. It was crushed by external forces. People desire to own their workplaces communally and run them democratically, and can do so successfully indefinitely, but this is unlikely to succeed long-term unless the workers also own the government. A State controlled by the few, by political parties, the upper class, capitalists, authoritarian socialists, or fascists, will pose a severe threat to anticapitalist enterprises.

Marx saw cooperatives as a

…victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands.” The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.

But he knew that capitalist political power would stand in the way.

To save the industrious masses, co-operative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor…. To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes.^[11]

Today, socialism has reemerged in Spain.

Take the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, one of Spain’s most profitable companies. Mondragon has 85,000 workers in a network of over one hundred cooperatives. No, it is not a perfect democratic workplace. It owns traditional companies in low-wage countries, where workers are not owners nor voters. Only 40% of its workers are worker-owners, democracy is nevertheless stronger than in capitalist firms.^[12] Yet the ratio between the highest salary and the lowest is 6.5 to 1. In rough economic times, worker-owners decide democratically how much their pay should be reduced or how many fewer hours they should work.^[13] Capitalist dictators are not around to fire people en masse. Further, Mondragon has the ability to transfer workers or wealth from successful cooperatives to ones that are struggling. Mondragon was founded in the 1950s, but not one of its companies went out of business or bankrupt until the board of directors voted to allow one to do so in 2013.

Spain also boasts a “little communist village,” Marinaleda, population 2,700. Since the late 1970s, Marinaleda, located in one of Spain’s poorest regions, transformed itself. It had over 60% unemployment, and many went without food for days. Largely thanks to the efforts of longtime mayor Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo—who as mayor organized occupations of military-owned land, the takeover of a palace, hunger strikes, a march across Spain to urge other mayors not to pay city debts, and the raiding of supermarkets for food like rice and beans to help the starving—Marinaleda is often called a utopia. Unemployment doesn’t exist, as anyone can work for the farming cooperative, which divides up profits to all workers, but reinvests surpluses to expand employment. Residents work six and a half hours a day for double Spain’s minimum wage. Crops like wheat are avoided: “wheat could be harvested with a machine, overseen by a few laborers; in Marinaleda, crops like artichokes and tomatoes were chosen precisely because they needed lots of labour. Why, the logic runs, should “efficiency” be the most important value in society, to the detriment of human life?”^[14] The town has a handful of privately-owned enterprises that exist alongside the cooperative. While there is no unemployment here, the region as a whole—Andalusia—has mass unemployment, 36% in 2013 (55% for those 24 and younger). Other towns, like Somonte, have taken note and are copying Marinaleda’s farming cooperative.^[15] After Spain’s housing crash, residents of Marinaleda could get a new home built for free, only paying about $19 a month afterwards for the rest of their lives—the home cannot be sold.^[16]

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Notes

^[1] Guerin, 122, 134

^[2] Guerin, 127

^[3] Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

^[4] Chomsky, Anarchism, 55

^[5] Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

^[6] Chomsky, Anarchism, 100

^[7] Chomsky, Anarchism, 64-65

^[8] Guerin, 128-129

^[9] Chomsky, Anarchism, 54

^[10] http://books.google.com/books?id=OJTKZeXaUvkC&pg=PA140&lpg=PA140&dq=%22a+communist+and+my+painting%22&source=bl&ots=SBRP93ZjFy&sig=jF1BvBvqrZ3iYfGq3sIDHywWhZY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=c5NpU4rNC-mfyQH_vIHgBw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22a%20communist%20and%20my%20painting%22&f=false

^[11] See Guerin

^[12] See Wright, 240-246.

^[13] Imagine, 78.

^[14] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/marinaleda-spanish-communist-village-utopia

^[15] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/marinaleda-spanish-communist-village-utopia

^[16] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22701384