The main weakness of Occupy Wall Street is its implication that only a tiny minority, mainly bank presidents and Fortune 500 CEOs, benefit from the gross inequalities of capitalism, and the rest of us need to unite to make things fairer.This idea hides the class nature of the capitalist profit system and all the agents it uses to enforce the exploitation of the working class. The Occupy slogan, We Are the 99%, distorts people’s understanding of the ranks of our class enemies.
Have you ever been directly supervised by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Koch, or any other billionaire? Hardly. In fact, many corporate vice presidents, human resources directors, managers, administrators and supervisors are links in the chain that binds us to the capitalist system.
Bosses’ Flunkies Not On Our Side
For example, an assembly-line worker has a foreman, the foreman’s supervisor, a plant manager, and so on up the line. All of these people are responsible for extracting surplus value (the source of all profits) from our labor. None of them are on our side. Similarly, a schoolteacher must answer to various assistant principals, a principal, a district superintendent, and the people elected or appointed to the board of education. All of these flunkies are on the bosses’ side, unless and until they demonstrate otherwise by such actions as supporting a strike or joining Progressive Labor Party.
One Percenters Have Millions of Agents
Other tools of the capitalist class include politicians (Democratic and Republican); political appointees (judges, district attorneys, commissioners, regulators); high-paid lawyers, money managers and other professionals; media hacks; entertainment performers and executives; religious leaders; and professors and think tank fellows, both liberal and conservative, who are charged with churning out capitalist ideology and strategy. And don’t forget highly paid national and local union leaders, whose job is to work together with the bosses to get workers to submit to layoffs and cuts in wages, working conditions, health benefits and pensions.
Then there are those charged with violently maintaining capitalist power in the U.S. and internationally the armed forces officer corps, the police, the prison guards. The cops and prison guards have proven time and again that they are corrupt, racist and sexist. They will follow any orders to attack workers, and dream up more on their own.
The same is true, with few exceptions, of the officer corps of the armed forces. Rank-and-file soldiers and sailors, however, are workers in uniform. They can be, have been, and will continue to be won to defy the brass and turn imperialist wars into a communist revolution against the ruling class.
In short, We Are the 99%, underestimates the number of people whose job it is to maintain inequality and who are committed to doing so. As our Party develops deeper roots in the working class, a segment of lower-level supervisors undoubtedly will join us. Nevertheless, that leaves a lot of people who are paid to support and fight for the capitalist class. At the same time, the 99% equation unites us with many bosses and their agents, in one great progressive, American mass including the cops who beat up Occupy Wall Streeters. The bosses plan for that movement is to march together, under the U.S. flag, in support of imperialist war.
“We Are the 99%,” however, contains one important aspect of truth. Whatever the actual percentages, the working class is immensely larger than the capitalist class and all its flunkies put together. We need real class consciousness based on the understanding that workers produce all value, most of which is stolen by the bosses. We need to build anti-racist, anti-sexist, international unity of all workers against all bosses and their servants. This will enable us to overthrow them and build a society based on equality and collectivity — communism.
