Get Rid of the 1%
by Grant Booth

I was getting over a cold, and it was very, very chilly outside. I’d just woken up from a nap in a patch of sun on December 12th, at Terminal 6 of the Port of Portland. The ILWU had honored our community picket line, and we had successfully shut down the Port of Portland. I was speaking groggily with a retiree from the Teamsters’ Union; I can’t remember his name for certain but I think it was BIll. We were discussing the current state of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We were both extremely excited that it had turned toward labor solidarity as part of the struggle for social and economic justice.

I asked him what he thought we should do to fix the problems of political corruption and social inequality that the movement was confronting. He said, “Clearly, we need to get the money out of politics.” I asked him how we could go about doing this. This, like many others, he was less clear on. Our discussion from there moved to a variety of topics, from the Citizens United Supreme Court decision which equated anonymous campaign contributions from corporations with free speech to the manner in which 90% of congressmen are millionaires and will land cushy jobs as CEOs after leaving office. Eventually, we moved to the idea of a society which doesn’t have career politicians and a class of super-rich people who own rather than work for a living---a society in which working people democratically control both their workplaces and the political arena. He seemed open to the idea; it was as though it was there all along and simply needed to be articulated. I gave him a copy of December’s Socialist Worker (socialistworker.org), and said goodbye.

The problem with the idea of “getting money out of politics” is that it assumes that political and economic power are separable---they aren’t. The problem is that no matter what kind of legal safeguard is put in place to attempt to separate the two, the 1% will find a way around it. Even if graft had not been legalized by Citizens United, there would still be more than enough illegal graft. The 1% use their economic power (gained through ownership of factories, land, etc.) to gain political power (buying congressmen and other public officials), then use their political power to reinforce their economic power (acquiring subsidies for their industries, protection from competition, privatization of state-run industries, etc.). They then use their ever-increasing wealth to gain ownership over more factories, land, etc., creating a cycle which causes more and more wealth and political power to accumulate in the hands of a few. This is how most of America’s productive forces have become concentrated in the hands of a few multi-national conglomerates (whose shareholders are primarily the 1%). If we want an egalitarian society, we need to challenge that ownership.

The massive, accumulated ownership and control of the owning class is not the result of their hard work, as some Fox News pundits might like you to believe. It is the result of, well, previous ownership. Some people may have started off with hard work, but once enough wealth has been accumulated, their wealth does their work for them. Sounds great, right? Isn’t that the American dream? The problem is that it comes at the expense of everyone else---the source of their profit is the exploitation of labor (paying workers less than the value of their work).

At various points in history, working people have found themselves in clear opposition to their owning classes. They wanted to work, eat, and have a warm, dry place to sleep. The owners wanted to maximize their profit, and the two interests didn’t coincide. Strike movements and mass protests followed. As a matter of necessity, workers were forced to take control over their workplaces to defend their right to a decent life. They distributed wages equally amongst themselves, and democratically decided the roles of different workers. Through this process, they discovered that they were actually perfectly capable of running their workplaces and society themselves. They began work on the process of forming a government consisting of workers’ delegates (workers acting briefly as politicians). These instances (Russia 1917, Seattle 1919, Spain 1936, France 1968, Chile 1972, and many others) show the potential for a democratic and egalitarian society to take root and flourish.

Economic power and political power are inseparable. If working people want to have a political system which represents them, they need to have an economic system which represents them---they need to take control over their workplaces and the economy as a whole. No matter how much legislation is passed (there won’t be much) and no matter how many protests one goes to (there will be many), if the fundamental problem of inequality in economic power is not confronted, we can never have a democratic society. We need to get rid of the 1%. Before you jump out of your seat and call me a murderous commie, let me be clear: I am not murderous. I’m not talking about lining up rich people and shooting them. I have something far more outrageous in mind: I think we should make them work for a living.