The documentary Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? is about the financial crisis that began in 2008. It continues to this day, with high unemployment, home foreclosures, and other aspects of capitalism that devastate workers’ lives. The documentary lays the blame firmly on the banks and compliant politicians for the fiasco. The format is mainly a series of interviews of people who expose the way banks have manipulated their financial control with the help of governmental rulings and deregulation. But the film tells only part of the story.

First, it shows the degree to which banks and big business owners are stealing virtually everything we produce with our labor. However, its main message is that the “heist” consists of a relatively recent move by big business, particularly banks. It traces this move to a 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell — shortly thereafter a Nixon-appointed Supreme Court Justice. In this memo Powell falsely claimed that there was a socialist attack on free enterprise and that big business needed to ward it off with extreme aggressiveness. It did, by mobilizing the full force of a friendly federal government to protect and magnify already swollen banking profits.

U.S. History: One Long Heist

While the filmmakers claim that this 41-year-old memo was the origin of the heist, can anyone remember a time in U.S. history when banks did not rob people to accumulate vast wealth? The so-called founding fathers were quite explicit that the role of government would be to protect their property from the mass of property-less people (what the Occupy Movement calls the 99%). The U.S. government was designed from the outset to protect the bosses from the workers. Far from a mere 41 years, this ongoing function of government is at least 223 years old. It has been punctuated by war on tens of millions of workers. 

Furthermore, by pointing the finger solely at the way big business buys politicians in order to dominate the rest of us, the film again misleads. It omits the fact that the owners of big business also determine school curricula, points of view in the media, levels of health care, funding of research through foundations, control over think tanks, and placement of government advisors from these think tanks who agree that world dominance by U.S. capital is the most vital function of government. In short, the capitalists rule through a class dictatorship. 

Rulers’ Ideas Their Trump Card

Control over not just government but all institutions in the society — particularly universities and secondary schools, as well as the media — means that the class of billionaires rules us through more than the military, cops, courts, prisons, and religious leaders. They rule through their ability to determine which ideas are permitted to flourish in the mainstream publishing, media, and educational outlets, and which ideas are to be punished (or threatened to be punished) by firings, imprisonment, and even assassinations. The degree to which these latter methods are less necessary today only reflects the success of the other methods in dominating the prevailing ideology.

While the film presents this as a conspiracy, class rule is far from a conspiracy. The overwhelming domination through capitalist ideology is the main thing that distinguishes class rule from conspiracy. Conspiracies do happen, but they are minor, fleeting, and almost trivial compared to the way the ruling class rules through ideological control — ideology that they firmly believe in, so they don’t all see it as domination.

Wars to Maintain Profits

One interviewee claims the problem is not profit itself, but rather excessive profits (implying some arbitrary unstated cutoff point between reasonable and excessive). He and the filmmakers miss the point that capitalism is driven by competition to seek not just profits, but maximum profits — making them inherently “excessive” sooner or later. Competition from other capitalist nations has led to endless wars and the slaughter of the working class to maintain profitability. The problem therefore is the profit system itself. Workers are victims of capitalist ideology. 

The problem for the world’s working class lies not just in thieving banks and politicians, but in the source of capitalist power that grants them the ability to carry out this theft continually. This source is the “excessive” profit-maximizing system itself, in which the rich necessarily get richer and most of us necessarily get poorer, as the bosses rob us on a daily basis. They protect and enforce this through their control of the state apparatus. 

500 Years IS Long Enough

For the last 500 years this has been the situation everywhere in the world where capitalism and its competition for maximum profits exist. PLP is building a worldwide communist movement of millions of workers and allies to destroy this system and its state and erect a workers’ state.

We strive to put the working class in control of an egalitarian system that allows us to satisfy all our needs collectively and through worldwide cooperation. Communism would be free of competition, profits, exploitation, and all the extreme miseries that the profit system produces. Join us today.