Saving capitalism from itself

Vanguard August 2014 p. 3


"– the pitchforks are coming"  – but they need to be carried in an organised fashion

Some members of the ruling class are alarmed that their obscene accumulation of wealth at the expense of workers has reached some enormous heights that it is threatening their own existence.

In the online Politico Magazine, billionaire Nick Hanauer warns “that the Pitchforks Are Coming – For Us Plutocrats”.

Hanauer says he is “one of those 0.01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist...What sets me apart, I think, is  a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see now? I see pitchforks.”

What concerns him is that the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ in the USA is at record levels and that the 0.01%ers’ “gated bubble worlds” will be destroyed by the ‘pitchforking masses’.

His solution to save capitalism from itself is to convince his fellow ruling class 0.01%ers that this ‘extreme’ inequality in wealth is ‘self-defeating’ and that policies similar to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression of the 1930s are necessary to ‘pre-empt the revolutionaries.’

He says Roosevelt type policies will mean the minority ruling class will ‘escape with our lives’ and ‘get even richer’.

However times have changed for US imperialism since the 1930s. In the 1930s US imperialism was on the rise and super profits extracted from the developing countries enabled the semblance of a welfare state to emerge under Roosevelt’s policies.

In 2014 US imperialism is on the decline and in debt to other rival imperialist powers, making a saving of capitalism from itself approach called for by Hanauer less likely.

Hanauer is concerned with what will happen “when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and destabilizing... revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly... if inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually, it (revolution) will happen.”

Hanauer does not advocate violent repression and further restriction of bourgeois democratic rights as a solution to social upheaval arising from the nature of the system of which he is a top beneficiary.

However rest assured that other members of the ruling class do not hesitate to use all means at their disposal to protect their class position.

So the real lesson from Hanauer’s plea to his rich ruling class colleagues is that spontaneous uprisings on a large scale are arguably inevitable, but not enough to sustain a revolutionary change of society in which the people control the means of production and distribution of wealth in society.

Leadership and organisation deeply embedded within the 99% is essential.