Why have crumbs when we can have the bakery

Just 400 billionaires have as much wealth as nearly two-thirds of American households combined. And just three individuals — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates — have as much wealth as half of all U.S. households put together.

Since the economic meltdown of 2008, the lion’s share of income and wealth growth hasn’t gone just to the top 1 percent — it’s gone to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. This 0.1 percent includes households with annual incomes starting at $2.2 million and wealth over $20 million.

This group has been the big winner of the last few decades. Its share of national income rose from 6 percent in 1995 to 11 percent in 2015. But their biggest gains are in wealth, increasing their share from 7 percent in 1978 to over 21 percent today.

That’s 210 times their share of the population.

When you have over $20 million, you’ve easily taken care of all your needs and those of the next generation of your family. You’re living in comfort, probably with multiple homes, and don’t want for anything. Despite being already comfortable beyond measure, segments of this 0.1 percent will often invest their wealth to rig the political rules to get even more wealth and power. 

They contribute the legal maximum donations to politicians and then do an end run around campaign finance laws to siphon even larger sums through “dark money” SuperPACs, using corporate entities that don’t have to disclose donors.

The 0.1 percenters create charitable foundations that become extensions of their own power and privilege. They undermine the health of the nonprofit sector by controlling a growing share of the charitable giving pie.

They deploy their wealth to help their kids get into elite colleges, both through donations and, as we’ve seen recently, outright bribery.

The World Socialist Party of the United States goes against the prevailing wisdom of the progressives and left-wingers who advocate the solution to inequality by increasing taxation on the wealthy and closing the financial loopholes that they use.

Even if such tax reforms were a success, power and wealth would not be transferred to the working class. All they would receive is perhaps larger and some extra crumbs from the capitalist table. The World Socialist Party has always held to a clear and precise definition of our aim, and being a democratic movement without leaders, any WSPUS member could be relied on to explain this clear definition of socialism: a worldwide system of society in which goods and services are produced solely to satisfy human needs, not profit; which will only be possible when all the productive resources are democratically controlled, rather than at present where they are owned and controlled by private individuals or by the state on the “people’s behalf”. It cannot therefore be a system of buying and selling or bartering. Money will then be redundant and become obsolete.

The time and energy spent on collecting crumbs from the capitalists’ table would be better directed to organising capture of the bakery.