While
they didn’t actually come right out and say that, an article posted by a
number of business-oriented Web sites in the last week irrefutably confirms
some of Karl Marx’s key assertions regarding the capitalist system.
Over
the past century and a half, countless capitalist politicians and academics
have built careers trying to prove that Marx and his writings were outdated,
misleading and just plain wrong. Nowhere has the effort to discredit Marxism
been more energetic than here in the United States.
Incurring
particular wrath in bourgeois circles over the years was Marx’s contention in
his groundbreaking 1867 work Volume I of “Capital”: “Accumulation of wealth at
one pole is, therefore, at the same time the accumulation of misery . . . at
the opposite pole.” In other words, as the rich get richer—and because they are
getting richer—the poor get poorer.
The
enemies of Marx and socialism argued vehemently that this had been disproven by
an overall rise in wages and living conditions for much of the working class
inside the imperialist countries in the late 19th and much of the 20th century.
What the apologists of capitalism always left out of their “analysis” was the
super-exploitation and extreme impoverishment of the workers and peasants of
Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East—the vast
majority of the world’s people—which, in addition to an industrial monopoly,
made possible a temporary rise in living standards inside the colonizing
states.
Over
the past three decades, however, working-class living standards in the United
States have resumed the downward trend inherent under capitalism, and in the
last few years at a quickly accelerating pace.
An
article by Michael Snyder, “The Middle Class in America is Radically Shrinking,
Here Are the Stats to Prove It,” has been picked up by numerous Web sites
including Tech Ticker and Business Insider. (While he uses the term “middle
class,” Snyder is really referring to the working class—but even talking about
workers as a class is discouraged in establishment circles. Sounds too much
like Marxism.)
The
points made by Snyder include:
- 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
- 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to
paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007. - 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent
of all Americans. - 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned
retirement age in the past year. - Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which
represented a 32 percent increase over 2008. - Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income
to match the rise in housing costs since 1975. - In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s
paycheck was about 30-to-1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to
between 300- and 500-to-1. - The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively
own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. - The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s
corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago. - More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in
service jobs, which are often very low paying. - For
the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food
stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number to go up to
43 million in 2011. - Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below
the poverty line in 2010—the highest rate in 20 years. - Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States
rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
While
presenting an array of very useful facts, Snyder does not draw the only logical
conclusion from his own report: The capitalist system must go.
