Year: 2016

My Sunday morning op-ed in the Green Bay Press Gazette debunking some of the distortions made by the governor’s office. Walker’s obsession with the modest salaries of teachers should be the subject of more media scrutiny. The question should be put to him, why teachers? 

Walker’s politics of resentment

I’m sharing a talk I gave tonight at the event “What is Socialism?” held at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The event was organized by the Critical Left.

It helps in answering the question “What is Socialism?” to compare it to what it will replace, namely capitalism. To introduce the distinction between capitalism and socialism, and make that distinction accessible, I reduce the respective political economic dynamics to the level of contrasting business firms.

Imagine a small company selling tables, each table has a $1000 price tag. Raw materials, equipment wear, energy costs, advertising, rent, and so forth comes to $200 per table. These are the constant (or fixed) capital inputs (or costs). The other $800 of the price comes from the value of labor expended, what in technical terms economists call value added. This is the variable capital component. It is termed “variable” because it adds more value that it takes to reproduce it, whereas constant capital is used up in production and only transfers the value contained in it. Out of it, $160 goes to the carpenter in wages. The working day is eight hours long, so the carpenter makes $20/hour. He makes a table per day. The remainder of the value added – $640 dollars – goes to the person who owns the company. Let’s say his name is Bob Fortner.

If Bob pays the carpenter the difference between what the table sells for and what it costs to reproduce the constant capital inputs, then Bob will have nothing at the end of the day. Bob is in business to make money. To make a profit, Bob must pay the carpenter less than the full amount of the value added in production. The larger the portion of value added is paid in wages, the less profit there is for Bob. Bob can reduce labor costs, and thus make more profit, either by paying lower wages or by increasing worker productivity. All this depends on Bob’s tables selling. Let’s assume that they are.

Let’s assume further that Bob employs ten carpenters and they produce ten tables/day. The daily constant capital inputs are $2,000. The daily variable capital costs are $1600. The value added by labor is $8,000. The company subtracts the $1600 a day in wages and banks $6,400 daily. By the end of the week, at $20/hour, each worker will have earned $800 in wages. The owner, earning $800/hour (what each worker makes in a day), will have earned $32,000 in the week. Annually, before taxes, the worker will have earned $41,600. However, Bob will have made $1,664,000 that year. By taking 75% of the value added in production, Bob makes 40 times what each worker makes in a year. Bob becomes a millionaire without making any tables.

Heres the math: Daily constant capital inputs: $2,000 = $200 X 10 tables. Daily variable capital inputs: $1600 = $160 X 10 tables. Daily value added: $8,000 = $800 X 10 tables. Daily surplus value: $6,400 = ($640 X 10 tables).

This is the basic premise of capitalism. The state and law protect Bob’s right to own a business in order to derive an unearned income from the labor of others, individuals who rent themselves to capitalists like Bob in order to obtain the resources they need to live. The prevailing ideology celebrates this arrangement as virtuous. Bob is a “risk taker,” a “job creator,” and the carpenters are expected to be grateful and industrious while he tells them what to do all day.

The capitalist scheme has some variability culturally and historically. In some societies/sectors, workers toil at the will of owners and accept the wages capitalists like Bob provide (it’s better than going hungry). In other societies/ sectors, workers have protections (e.g. no dismissal without cause) and can collectively bargain for wages and benefits (if there are unions). Such a society might even allow for popular elections and provide social welfare, universal healthcare, and public education to all its people. However much these improve the social situation, none of these features change the essence of the economic relationship: Bob appropriates the value of the carpenters’ labor.

Now, imagine a society in which the carpenters collectively own the company that produces the tables. The carpenters keep the value added in production, or $800 a day for each worker instead of the $160/day salary. At this rate, each worker will earn $208,000 a year, a salary that puts the carpenter in the top 2 percent of income earners in the state of Wisconsin.  This is the basic premise of a socialist society. Under these arrangements, the state and law protect and promote the carpenters’ right to collectively own the means of production and to derive their income from their labor efforts and prevent situations in which persons have to give up most of the value added in work to people like Bob who do not add value.

As with capitalism, the character of socialism is also variable. A socialist society might allow for popular elections, as well as provide for social welfare, universal healthcare, and public education. This is what would properly be termed “democratic socialism,” a term we are hearing quite a lot in the current political campaign (which I think it is misapplied in the case of Bernie Sanders, who is really a social democrat). Such a society may even decide to divide the social surplus among the population based on need rather than productive output, what Karl Marx called communism. However, a socialist society may instead be governed by an authoritarian state apparatus. Of course, authoritarianism is also a possibility in capitalist societies, and there are plenty of historical examples of authoritarian state capitalism, for example, Nazi Germany.

Since I am here to advocate, as well as define and explain, I want to note three possible benefits of socialism:

• Since control over the means of production is the locus of power that shapes other forms of power, a more equitable distribution of economic power carries with it the potential for deepening democratic culture.
• Whereas a capitalist uses labor-saving technology – robotics and automation – to generate more profits for a small number of families and enlarge the population of redundant and impoverished labor, a socialist might instead use labor-saving technology to reduce the amount of necessary labor performed by members of society, in turn using those productivity gains to create more free time for individuals, time that could be spent on friends and families and creative activities of their choosing.
• Capitalism’s imperative is to grow, and the more freely it is allowed the grow, the more destructive it is to humans and their environment. Tightly regulated capitalist countries, such as those in Scandinavia, have better living conditions and have a smaller ecological footprint than less well-regulated capitalist countries. However, production in the more democratic capitalist countries is still motivated by the growth imperative. By deepening democratic culture and raising the standard of living for everyone through the socialism I am describing, it is possible to devise systems of production based on renewable resources that sharply reduces our ecological footprint.

Okay, so let’s take the parable of the table-makers to the real economy. The Bureau Census routinely collects data on economic activity in the United States in its Survey of Manufacturers. If we take a look at the data from the manufacturing sector, we find that manufacturing workers earn on average $22.15/hour. That’s $886 a week or a before-tax annual income of $46,072. In 2014, the median family income in the United States was $53,657. A household earning the average manufacturing wage needs two income earners to have a chance of reaching the median household income. However, the hourly value added by a manufacturing worker is $151.50. This value is free and clear of the constant or fixed capital costs. Subtracting the wage paid to the worker, the surplus value is $129.35/hr. This means that the amount of value produced by the worker appropriated by capitalist firm is nearly six times greater than the wage the worker earns. Is it any wonder that the top wealthiest 1% of the US population possess 40% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 80% can claim only 7%?

Now imagine if the manufacturing worker owned the firm collectively with her fellow workers and they were able to keep the full value of their labor. Assuming the averages that we have been discussing. Under these arrangements, each worker would earn $6,060 a week, or $315,120 a year. This would put them in the top 1% of wage earners. This is the truth that capitalists don’t want you to know or to act upon. Because if you did, it would surely bring an end to the gravy train they’re riding – at your expense. They’re living off your labor, comrade.

For those appealing to the religious freedom part of the US Constitution, a few reminders. Religion is specifically referenced in the US Constitution: “…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” That means that you can be President, dog catcher, whatever, if you believe in a god or gods—whichever god/s you believe in, it doesn’t matter—or if don’t believe in a god or gods at all. You can thank the founding fathers for this, as they were secularists who wanted to prevent the government from becoming an administration of religious doctrine.

Swearing on the Bible is a custom It is not a requirement. There’s no problem swearing on the Quran or a stack of law books or Spiderman comics. By definition, in the government’s eyes, you are a citizen of the republic first and a religious person second.

The First Amendment (found in the US Bill of Rights attached to the US Constitution) refers specifically to religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” This means that, while you are free to exercise your religion (within reason), you are not free to use the public authority to establish religious institutions or further religious doctrines—and, in fact, the latter is circumscribed by the former.

In other words, you are free to set up an establishment of religion, but you cannot expect the government to respect that establishment, and that also means not everything your religion tells you to do is allowable. Is human sacrifice is part of your religious doctrine? Sorry. You are not being persecuted because the government will not protect your religious practice of ritual killing. Same goes for ritual rape. The same should go for mutilating the genitals of children, but clearly we have some work to do in areas.

So can we please get this straight? If you want to sit in a big elaborately decorated room listening to a man in a funny hat speak at you in Latin and put wafters on your tongue while incense smoke spirals around you, have at it, Hoss. But if you want the state to deny marriage to a lesbian couple because you think your holy book says that’s wrong, then you are living in the wrong country. You are certainly welcome here, but only if you follow the rules. And if you want to be president with the idea that you will impose religious doctrine on the public, then this is disqualifying.

Update (May 1, 2021): I have in subsequent blogs on Freedom and Reason walked back the argument made in this blog and the associated TruthOut op-ed published in 2016. I am pictured holding Mac Donald’s 2016 book, The War on Cops, which I should have read before writing my op-ed. In my defense, I was responding to her op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Moreover, there was a string of research that came out after I wrote my op-ed that confirmed Mac Donald’s thesis (see links at the end of the paragraph). Nonetheless, the book is chockfull of statistics that anticipate that body of scholarly research and attention to her arguments would likely have at least moved me to write a more nuanced critique of her work. (See Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect: What the Left and Right Get Right (and Wrong) About Crime and Violence; The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter; The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters; “If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities.)

In her essay, “The Myths of Black Lives Matter,” published in The Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald writes that “fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths.” Citing The Washington Post database of police shootings, Mac Donald reports that “officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics and 258 blacks” in 2015. That means that 28 percent of those killed by the police in 2015 were Black. But blacks are only around 12 percent of the US population.

When Black Lives Matter (BLM) spokespersons say that black lives are at greater risk than white lives to be killed by the police, the evidence Mac Donald uses in her essay supports the movement’s claim. Demographically speaking, black Americans were more than twice as likely to be killed by the police than whites and Latinos combined in 2015. Yet Mac Donald concludes that black overrepresentation in police shootings is a myth. Moreover, Mac Donald’s lumping of whites and Latinos hides the disproportionate number of police shootings of Latinos compared to non-Hispanic whites.

Mac Donald next turns to the FBI’s 2014 homicide numbers to claim that the white and Latino victims of police shootings make up 12 percent of all white and Latino homicide deaths, a statistic that is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings. She claims that the lower proportion for black deaths is due to the significant black-on-black homicide rate. This is a red herring. The BLM protest is not about black-on-black crime, but about racial disparities in death by cop. Decrying black-on-black homicide after every high-profile killing of a civilian by a cop has become cliché for conservative pundits (and almost obligatory for liberals who want to be taken seriously). But it is entirely beside the point.

Mac Donald attempts to justify police shootings by claiming that officers are killed by black people at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which black people are killed by police. She claims that 40 percent of assailants in cop killings are black. Mac Donald doesn’t specify a time frame, only that these are data the FBI has been collecting for some time. If we look at the FBI figures from 2014 (the latest available), which suits Mac Donald’s analysis better, we find that 22 percent of assailants were black.

That figure, while considerably lower than the figure she uses, still indicates overrepresentation of black Americans in the killing of cops. But what is this comparison supposed to tell us? Forty-two cops were killed by guns in 2015. Using Mac Donald’s percentage of 40 percent, that means 17 cops died at the hands of black assailants (almost twice as many as the FBI’s 2014 figure indicates). If the point is one of comparison, then the number of black people killed by police in the time frame Mac Donald is using is more than 15 times greater than the number of cops killed by black people (almost 30 times greater using the 2014 figures).

Finally, the statistic about white officers being less prone to threat misperception is yet another red herring. Again, BLM is primarily interested in the race of the victim, not the race of the perpetrator per se (although the movement does call for ethnic and racial proportionality in law enforcement to match neighborhood composition). Moreover, Mac Donald’s point rests on the false assumption that racially biased practices must necessarily match the race of the perpetrators. Black officers take up racially biased practices in training and expectation, racially biased practices that put black lives in danger.

“The Black Lives Matter movement has been stunningly successful in changing the subject from the realities of violent crime,” Mac Donald concludes her essay. But who is changing the subject?

As noted, the trend in the number of law enforcement fatalities is lower today than any time since the 1940s. This is due mainly to two facts: violent crime is at historic lows in the United States and gun control. This also means lower levels of fatalities from interpersonal violence generally. Gun ownership has declined sharply over the last half century. America is a much less violent place than it used to be – if by violence we mean civilian-on-civilian violence. 

Yet police killing of civilians is at historically high levels. The year 2015 wasn’t remarkable. In 2014, police killed more than a thousand civilians. For every civilians killed (by gun, vehicle, Taser, beating, suffocation etc.), there are hundreds more injured (brain damaged, paralyzed, traumatized) and thousands more left with their rights violated. The vast majority of victims of police brutality and homicide are unarmed civilians who are in principle innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and, in any case, have done nothing serious even if there is some underlying crime in the situation. They vast majority 0f civilians killed and injured represented no realistic threat to police. Many are elderly, disabled, and mentally ill persons.

Those of us who work in the field of criminal justice have recognized this problem for a long time. So have governments. And experts have long known the reasons this problem exists, persists, and has grown worse. Yet, even when they admit to the problem, governments won’t address the problem with any significant reform agenda. On the contrary, many governments are moving to make it easier to kill and maim civilians without consequence.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are paying out millions of dollars to victims who bring successful law suits against the police, while most other victims remain uncompensated for their injuries and their lost loved ones. Of course, nothing can replace the loss of somebody you love. But there must be accountability, and as long as the police are literally allowed to get away with murder and assault, then taxpayers will continue to bear the cost of an institution out of control.

The solutions to the problem are obvious (or should be): drastically reduce force levels (we have too many cops); end the war on drugs and public order offenses; end confrontational practices of broken windows, stop-and-frisk, checkpoints, and roadblocks; demilitarize the police (no more armored personnel carriers and tanks on our city streets); use SWAT only in live shooter situations; disarm most officers (including Tasers, which have killed hundreds of people and injured hundreds more); train officers in conflict resolution and peacemaking (soldiers are better at this than cops); have high standards in recruiting, keep those with low IQs or abnormal psych profiles off the force (policing it not a good space for bullies); Have every act of force by a police officer reviewed in the same way that any other act of force by any other citizen against another citizen is review; and end the practice of indoctrinating cops by showing them a video of a one-time situation in which a cop runs around in circles begging for his life while a right-wing gun fanatic shoots him multiple times.

“Our officers just want to go home their families.” So do we all. The vast majority of officers go home to their families and eventually retire (early) with their lives and their pensions intact.

See also: Changing the Subject from the Realities of Death by Cop, TruthOut, July 20, 2016.